Should Travel Be Inexpensive?

Posted: 12/19/22 | December 19th, 2022

The term “budget travel” has long been synonymous with “cheap travel.” Finding deals, getting off the beaten path, eating at “non-touristy” (i.e. inexpensive) restaurants, and staying in hostels. The budget traveler is on a quest for a “local” experience at a low cost.

During the 2010s, the rise of sharing economy websites like Airbnb, increased competition in the travel industry, and the growing number of budget airlines offering long-haul flights made traveling on less a lot easier to do.

And travelers took advantage: global tourism rose from 946 million annual travelers to 1.4 billion over the past decade.

However, this spiraling growth created a lot of backlash among residents, as many destinations weren’t equipped to handle so many visitors driving around, clogging streets, and raising the cost of living. Plus, locals didn’t like feeling like they lived in a zoo, constantly being gawked at by tourists.

Pre-COVID, overtourism became the hot industry topic. “How do we make travel more sustainable?” we all wondered.

And, despite the recent rise in prices post-COVID, traveling is still relatively affordable, especially compared to historical averages.

But is inexpensive travel really a good thing? Should it be so cheap if it means it’s also unsustainable?

I know that’s a weird question for me to pose, as I’m in the business of budget travel. And don’t get me wrong: I don’t think travel should only be for the wealthy. Travel opens the mind. It helps people understand the world, those who live in it, and themselves. So, I want to be very clear that I am not advocating that travel be out of reach for all but the elite few. I think every person in the world should be able to see more than their little corner of the world.

But should we enable a type of mass tourism that creates a lot of environmental and social woes?

Looking around these days, I think we have too much of a good thing. I think there should be some tighter restrictions on travel so that we don’t love places to death.

I backpacked a lot back when Wi-Fi, apps, and smartphones were not widespread and you still had to use a paper guidebook to get around. (Even then, though, people would tell me how hard travel “back in the day” was and how easy I had it with the advent of online booking platforms.)

There were plenty of ways to travel cheap back then — it was just that the information you needed was harder…