Changes in attitudes, changes in traveling

How do you travel?

      I’m asking because my friend and colleague Mitch Stephens, the co-editor of this site, is currently traveling in Scotland, and then he and his wife will be going somewhere, although they haven’t quite made up their minds exactly where yet and definitely haven’t made any reservations.

      Not for planes, nor trains, nor automobiles. Not for hotels, too.

      They might be going, they think, to southwestern France. Or maybe to Spain. Or maybe they’ll explore more of the UK. Or maybe not. They’ll figure it out. They’ll make those reservations, just no need to do them until they have to.

      They hadn’t made their train reservation to Edinburgh and their hotel reservation in Edinburgh until something like a few minutes before got on a plane to London.

      It’s a great way to travel. It’s not, any longer, my way.

      And I’m guessing, it’s not the way many of us now travel these days.

      As we’ve grown older, many of us, in fact, have dialed back the adventurousness, the spontaneity of our pleasure travel. We may have more time now, we likely may even travel more, but increasingly we opt for safer, contained, predictable and most reassuring, supported kind of travel.

      That’s why cruises. With cruises, you don’t have to worry about finding a hotel or planning a route or deciding where you’re going or choosing a restaurant. You don’t have to walk a lot, too, if you’re not up for it. Perhaps most important, you don’t have to worry about being lost and not speaking the language and trying to figure out where’s the nearest bathroom.

      According to industry statistics, a third of those who have taken a cruise within the last year are people 65 and over. The percentages are even higher for those taking the even more predictable and contained river cruises.

      If it’s Tuesday, yes, this must be the Danube.

      That’s also why package tours, including all the ones now more or less specifically designed for “older travelers”—Road Scholar, Overseas Adventure Travel, Tauck. They are not only interesting, well-designed trips that include cultural and intellectual components, they are secure ways to explore the exotic or almost-exotic.

      My wife and I haven’t yet succumbed to the lure and security of packaged travel. We still like wandering on our own, choosing our own itineraries, exploring by ourselves. We like the serendipity of chance encounters, even the ones that result from heading the wrong way, getting lost or buying the wrong ticket.

      But we also like researching our own choices, carefully cross-referencing different websites to find what’s a highly rated hotel in Naxos, Greece (it’s the Grotta) and how, using public transit, do you get from Athens to Delphi? (

      According to the Expedia travel site, we are not alone, as boomers take the most time to plan their trips, often booking months in advance.

      Years ago, we used to travel more like Mitch and his wife Esther. We wouldn’t make reservations in advance or check things out online (there was no online) or have specific ideas of where we were going. If a road looked interesting, we’d take it, always assuming that it would take us someplace interesting and that there would be an acceptable place to stay at the end of the road.

      Now we want to be surer that the hotel is not a Motel 6. And when the train leaves and is there a direct flight?

      We do want more predictable, but we’re not yet ready for completely predictable.

      How about you? How do you travel now?