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One of the world’s great divides is between people who can afford to go on holiday and those who can’t. Asser Khattab, a Syrian refugee in France, recalls, “I grew up surrounded by people who have never experienced the joy of peaceful tranquillity, the insouciance of a summer holiday or the option of disconnecting for a few hours a day to indulge in a variety of pastimes; I thought that this was normal.” And it always was normal, for most humans since history began.
That’s now changing. This year is forecast to be a record year for international travel. Barring another pandemic, numbers should keep rising after that, as billions of people finally acquire disposable income and discover the life-altering experience of going on holiday.
A lucky few were already vacationing in ancient times, when rich Romans kept seaside villas on the Gulf of Naples. In Victorian Britain, millworkers went to the beach every Wakes Week. From the 1840s, the coming of the railways began democratising international travel. Suddenly, ordinary Britons could take “excursions” to Paris or to see the battlefield at Waterloo. These early travellers mostly travelled in tour groups to save money and enjoy the protection of guides who could mediate strange languages and cultures. Chinese tourists in the 2000s did likewise.
Imagine the sense of wonder of people leaving their constrained worlds for the first time. Orvar Löfgren, in his 1999 book On Holiday: A History of Vacationing, cites Agnes, a German immigrant maid in New York after the turn of the 20th century, who loved taking boat trips with friends. She wrote of her favourite destination, Coney Island: “Ach, it is just like what I see when I dream of heaven.”
That was the pitch of 1950s promoters selling “mystery tours” by charabanc to working-class Liverpool families. In the recent podcast series McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, Paul McCartney recalls that the supposed mystery destination was usually the seaside at Blackpool. Still, the journey felt so magical that he later conflated it with hallucinogenic drug trips into The Beatles’ song “Magical Mystery Tour”.
These holidays offered escape from life-sapping routine. There was no boss telling you when to get up or what to do. Housewives didn’t have to clean all day. Everyone could celebrate their ascension to the holidaymaking class. I remember as a child in the 1970s spending an evening watching a boring slideshow of the neighbours’ vacation pictures. They were so proud.
Then there’s mental health. Being somewhere else helps put your own life into perspective. You may not learn much about the place you’re visiting, but you learn something more valuable: about home. You grasp that the few square miles of your existence aren’t the entire world. That can make your problems seem manageable.
I realised how rare this privilege was one midnight about 25 years ago, when I was making photocopies at a print shop in Chicago. The young saleswoman wandered over to chat. She confided that her life as a single mother felt unbearably hard. But she had recently been away for the first time, to Milwaukee, and had seen that life there was hard too. Maybe, she surmised, it was like that everywhere. She was desperately seeking points of comparison for her experiences. Part of her suffering — and part of the unique cruelty of American capitalism — was that she lived in the only developed country without guaranteed paid holidays.
My first book, Football Against the Enemy, published in 1994, was about football fans. In Glasgow, I met an ex-player named Jim Craig, and together we bemoaned the aggression of some hardcore supporters of Celtic and Rangers. Then Craig said: “Don’t forget, though: you’ll get a summer holiday, I’ll get a summer holiday, but they won’t get a summer holiday.”
More people than ever now do. Largely because of cheaper airfares and the expansion of short-term rentals such as Airbnb, “the average spend per international trip fell 17 per cent in real terms” between 2000 and 2019, according to the World Travel Market’s Global Travel Report. That’s bad for the climate and good for mental health. Last winter, during a work trip to India, I escaped to the seaside at Goa. From stories of western friends, I had imagined it as a playground for western backpackers. By 2023, almost all the tourists were Indians — a few of whom were probably taking their first holiday.
It’s easy to mock people who film themselves in the plane. But some of them are basking in a pleasure that their parents never experienced.
Email Simon at simon.kuper@ft.com
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