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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think a lot of it is just that researching travel is so much easier than it used to be.  Back in the day you needed someone to send you everything from paper maps to hotel recommendations to restaurant recommendations to activities. Planning a trip involved you or a travel agent writing letters to request information from multiple tourism agencies.  It was a huge hassle.

Now everything is on the Internet.  It's simple to look up transit information, hotel and restaurant reviews, buy tickets for activities, etc.  Everything has been reviewed and you can even watch video reviews with tons of information.  It's much lower risk and much, much easier.  The world feels smaller.

I remember traveling Eastern Europe just before the Internet and I relied heavily on a travel book like Lonely Planet or Let's Go.  But those often had information that was 2-4 years out of date because of publishing timelines.  So I'd get off the train in a new place and walk to the tourism office to get the scoop.  In some places you'd get off a bus and ask at the local bar about people who would put up backpackers.  I was super flexible as a backpacker, but I can't imagine doing that with a family.  You'd have to write ahead for info.  Now, you can plan everything with just a few clicks.  It's not at all the same.[/quote]

I miss the old way sometimes. My first two international trips were before online travel planning was really a thing (early 00s so the internet existed, but you weren't booking flights and researching your whole trip online) and I actually liked it. I liked using those books as a guide but then having to make decisions on the fly. One of them was a classic college kid backpacking in Europe adventure, and I remember getting into a city on a train with a friend and then heading off to find a hostel. Can you imagine? No reservations. If our first choice based on friend recommendations and travel guide books was full, we'd have to go to the next one. In the meantime, you'd be interacting with a bunch of people who either didn't speak English or pretended not to, navigating public transportation and street signs in a foreign language, going to a grocery store to grab bread and cheese and an apple for a quick lunch in a park somewhere. It felt like real adventure even though it was also pretty safe.

I sometimes wonder if my kid will get to have experiences like that as a young adult. I hope so. I don't want her thinking everything has to be planned down to the last minute and that there's no room for just wandering and seeing what happens. I have these very specific memories of stuff like having to change money in a bank in Prague where no one spoke any English and we spoke no Czech, and having a friend who knew some Polish helping us navigate it. Or having an extremely kind hostel "mom" in Florence take pity on us when we got in really late and there were no rooms, and arrange for us to stay in her friend's vacant apartment next door instead, and having to take the leap to trust her. Those are the sorts of travel experiences every young person should have some version of.[/quote]

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