Maurer The Future of Travel

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-911545-80-4
Verlag: Melville House UK
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 10, 128 Seiten

Reihe: FUTURES

A leading travel journalists depicts and predicts the good, the bad, and the ugly about the future of travel - and how we can transcend the complications of climate change, AI, and touristification in this latest addition to the FUTURES Series. In the future, tourists will strap on a VR headset that serves up information about the storefronts and cathedrals they pass, letting them 'see Paris' without actually laying eyes on it. Instant-translation earbuds will mean we'll never have to learn the words Dónde está la biblioteca? - and who needs a library or bookstore when Spanish-English dictionaries and guidebooks are obsolete? Meanwhile, thanks to AI, travelers will have an unprecedented fount of information at their disposal - but how much of it can be trusted? And is it really 'saving time' if AI bots are sending everyone to stand in line at already-overrun tourist spots? In the coming years, more cities and countries will take drastic measures to combat not only a flood of tourist but of a growing worldwide workforce of 'location-independent professionals,' enacting congestion pricing and car-free zones, and grounding budget airlines such as Ryanair (or 'Ruinair,' as climate activists have dubbed it) in favor of zero-emission, hydrogen-fueled train networks. In The Future of Travel, award-winning food and travel writer Daniel Maurer - himself a veteran globetrotter - will predict epic tugs-of-war between the travelers and the locals and what happens when technology allows entire new classes of travelers to move - as far as they can, as much as they can.

Daniel Maurer is an award-winning food, culture and travel journalist who has written for outlets such as The New York Times, New York Magazine, Thrillist, The Art Newspaper, Eater, The Daily Beast, Atlas Obscura, and others. He won two James Beard Media Awards while chief editor of Grub Street, a pioneering restaurant blog that he co-founded at New York Magazine. He has spent the past few years as a digital nomad, living out of houseboat hotels in Berlin and Prague, cave homes in Andalucia, poo-emoji cabins on Lake Titicaca, campervans in the Swiss Alps, and at one point a former cult leader's compound in Utah. He currently lives in Barcelona..

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maurer, Daniel

Leseproben

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

A few years ago, at an estate sale, I bought a bookcase that once belonged to Anthony Bourdain. I thought it would serve as a constant reminder of something he once said: ‘Move. As far as you can, as much as you can.’ Turns out, owning a seven-foot-tall oak monolith makes it hard to do any moving at all. I discovered this when I lost my job during the Covid-19 pandemic and decided to leave New York City after two decades there. When I sold off all my belongings, Bourdain’s imposing Stickley bookcase was one of the last things to go. It towered over my increasingly barren living room, its shelves eerily empty of travelogues and guidebooks.

Eventually, the bookcase found a buyer. As Arthur and I loaded it into his SUV, he suggested I visit his home country and watch the Uruguay episodes of Parts Unknown and No Reservations. I was immediately sold on Bourdain’s description of Montevideo as ‘the opposite of New York’, a place with a ‘crumbling cool, a peeling grandeur similar to Havana’s’.

Anthony Bourdain was my patron saint of travel. His assurance that, ‘the extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody’, made me believe that the harried vacations I took from my office job could be enlightening, transformative. In the Uruguay episode of No Reservations, he stumbles upon a candombe drum circle in the streets of Montevideo and marvels, ‘I can’t believe this place hasn’t been discovered’. Having decided to try my luck as a full-time freelance travel writer, I saw this as an invitation.

There was an actual invitation as well: Arthur told me that if I went to Montevideo, he’d connect me with his family. The gesture was markedly different from the ways in which we discover new places post-Bourdain – by skimming listicles, chatting with AI, and watching online videos in which fresh-off-the-boat influencers insist, via clickbait titles, that a country is ‘NOT what they say it is’.

I became convinced that Uruguay would be my ‘it’, to borrow a term from On the Road. It had sun. It had sand. And it was somewhat of a mystery. There was just one problem: Its borders were closed indefinitely.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a wakeup call for all of us who had started taking one-click travel for granted – the moment in Up in the Air when George Clooney’s character, on his way to 10 million miles, is told, ‘You’re grounded. Everybody’s grounded. It’s done.’ Suddenly it was illegal to enter most countries; air travel entailed quarantines, proof of vaccination, negative test results, masking – and forget about the bar cart.

The pandemic taught us that travel is a privilege that can be stripped from us at any time. Throughout my lifetime, my options and liberties as a traveler had only expanded: Low-cost airlines had made flights more affordable; ‘travel hacking’ sites had made the affordable flights easier to find; home-sharing apps had made lodging more diverse and abundant; mobility apps had made unfamiliar cities more manageable; ride-sharing apps made it simpler and cheaper to get across town. And translation apps served up the Czech, Georgian or Tagalog version of those first words I learned in French class: ‘Où est le McDo?’

During the pandemic, travel was no longer a breeze. In March 2020, when I flew to Louisiana to form what was not yet known as a ‘pod’, or a ‘bubble’, in a town named Cut Off, a friend who was sheltering at home told me to ‘have fun killing people’. The flight attendants made jokes about the plane being my private jet as they tossed me, its sole passenger, trail mix bags by the handful. In the surreally empty New Orleans airport, Southwest Airlines agents were playing cornhole in front of their check-in desks.

I justified my Covid travel as self-care – an attempt to avoid the winter blahs that often gripped me in New York City. I argued that I was being a responsible consumer in the face of economic crisis. After all, didn’t President George W. Bush tell Americans to ‘get down to Disney World’ when airlines were struggling after 9/11? In truth, I was simply eager to enjoy the new mobility that came with not having to go into the office every day, and much of the world would soon join me in taking advantage of it.

Despite my giddiness over US$27 airfares, this might’ve been the first time I experienced travel as a moral dilemma rather than solely a means of ‘broadening horizons’. In early 2021, I traveled to Mérida, Mexico, where Covid-19 rates were relatively low. Every time I strolled through a sidewalk mister and wiped my feet on a disinfecting mat before entering a restaurant, I wondered how the waiters felt about me: were they resentful about being put at risk, or grateful for the tips I was leaving in their otherwise empty dining rooms? Was I supporting them or exploiting them? Or a little bit of both? ‘Would you mind settling up?’ a waiter in Austin, Texas, asked me moments after the TV announced that restaurants there would have to close. ‘Because I don’t have a job anymore.’

My own job was soon to follow. When the pandemic struck, my employer froze budgets and made it clear that the news site I had founded was in danger of shutting down. I tried to keep the site vital by assigning stories about the pandemic, including one about New York City trying to reboot tourism via virtual tours and ‘staycations’. With hotel rooms being converted into office space, the industry seemed unlikely to recover in the foreseeable future.

Little did we know that ‘revenge travel’ would become a worldwide phenomenon. If current projections stand, the number of people flying each year will break 5 billion for the first time in 2025,1 and global tourism will double by 2050,2 thanks in part to rapidly growing middle classes in developing countries like China and India and, to a lesser extent, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.3 The global middle class will increase by 1.7 billion in the next two decades.4 With GDP in Asia Pacific on track to grow by 65 per cent during that time, trips per capita there will double – by 2043, nearly half of global air traffic will depart or originate from the region.5 This explosion in travel will bring increased prosperity to many destinations, but will strain others as the prices of housing, goods and services rise. Waiters may find that the extra money in their tip jar isn’t enough to cover their latest rent increase.

When my employer told me over Zoom, in May 2021, that I was being laid off, I was paying US$2,400 per month to live on a houseboat on a far edge of Queens. I decided I’d spend one last summer there and leave New York City before another bracingly cold winter set in. I didn’t really have much choice. My landlord was selling the boat. The new owner would end up giving it an HGTV-style makeover and doing what enterprising landlords are doing all over the world – listing it on Airbnb at six times my monthly rent.

Having visited an old New York friend who had moved to Bangkok, I had seen how cheaply one could live abroad. I envied his easygoing life of riding tuk-tuks to river bars and admiring sunsets from rooftop infinity pools, but I couldn’t imagine giving up the security of a decent salary, a retirement plan and a place in the world. When all of that disappeared in an instant, I knew it was time to hit the road. I felt like I was doing something wild and anachronistic – a throwback to the days of living down and out in Paris. In reality, I was part of a growing, worldwide phenomenon. My kindred spirits weren’t so much Orwell, Miller, Stein and Hemingway – they were twenty-three-year-old social media managers. I had joined the swelling ranks of digital nomads.

Since 2019, the number of American workers describing themselves as digital nomads has more than doubled, with 11 per cent doing so in 2024. The trend is only expected to continue: 21 million Americans say they plan to become digital nomads.6 Though 2025 found many employers calling their remote workers back into the office, it’s hard to put the cat back into the cubicle. Surveys show that employees are willing to take pay cuts in order to keep working from home7 – hence a marked increase in job postings offering telework. As a result, long-term rentals have become a greater share of Airbnb’s business.8 By 2030, the number of global digital jobs is expected to rise by about 25 per cent, to around 92 million.9

In his book Nomads, Anthony Sattin notes that during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the roving hunter-gatherers, herders and warriors who had, for centuries, made up half of society – who helped shape the course of history – came to be seen as ‘people without arts, morals, literature, laws or reason’. Today,...