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From Traveler to Tourirt:

encounter. They are always devising efficient new ways of insulating the tourist from the travel world.

In the old traveler’s accounts, the colorful native inn-keeper, fuli of sagę advice and local lorę, was a familiar fig-ure. Now he is obsolete.; Today on Main Street in your home town you can arrange transportation, food, lodging, and en-tertainment for Romę, Sydney, Singapore, or Tokyo.

No morę gfcąffering. A well-planned tour saves the tourist from negotiating with the natives when he gets there. One reason why retuming tourists nowadays talk so much about and are so irritated by tipping practices is that these are al-most their only direct contact with the people. Even this may soon be eliminated. The Travel Plant Commission of the International Union of Official Travel Organizations in 1958 was studying ways of standardizing tipping practices so that eventually all gratuities could be included in the tour pack-age. IShopping, like tipping, is one of the few actiyities re-maining for the tourist. |It is a chink in that wali of prear-rangements which separates him from the country he visits. No wonder he finds it exciting. When he shops he actually encounters natives, negotiates in their strange language, and discovers their local business etiquette. In a word, he tastes the thrill and “travail” which the old-time traveler once ex-perienced all along the way—with every purchase of transportation, with every night’s lodging, with every meal.

A planned excursion insulates the tourist in still another way. From its first invention by Thomas Cook in the early nineteenth century, the fully prearranged group tour promised ^ j flgood-fellowship with one’s countrymen in addition to the exotic pleasure of foreign sights. The luxury ocean liner and the all-expense “cruise” (the word in this sense is very recent and is possibly an American invention; originally it meant “to sail from place to place, as for pleasure, without a set desti-nation”) have madę this kind of travel amount to residence

in a floating resort hotel.    __

— ) (Shipmates now replace the natives as a source of adven-ture. Unadvertised risks from pickpockets and bandits are

sights which disappoint the bachelor or spinster on a cruise are not the Vatican, the Louvre, or the Acropolis but the ship-mates. Except for tipping and shopping adventures, retuming cruisers have little to report about encounters with the na-tives, but they have a great deal to say about their country-men on tour with them. The authorized centennial history of American Express recounts the tribulations of a cruise di-rector on a round-the-world cruise. He was obliged, among other things, “to rescue a susceptible young playboy from the wiles of a cruising adventuress; play cupid to a British baronet and an American actress; guard the widów of an Australian pearl magnate who carried tin cans fuli of matched pearls loose in her baggage; quietly settle an attempted murder in Calcutta; protect his charges during the pitched battle with which Hindus and Mohammedans celebrated the Harvest Festival in Agra; reason with a passenger who demanded a refund because he lost a day when the ship crossed the inter-national datę linę; and hołd the hand of a lonely old lady as she lay dying in a hotel in Romę.” In the old days, an excur-sion director was called a “guide”; now he is a “social di-rector ”

Of course the voyager, even on a planned excursion, is likely to be less insulated on land than on sea, and he is least insulated if he goes alone. But the notion of packaged tour-ing has so prevailed that when a person goes by himself the American Express travel department gives his package a spe-cial name, “F.I.T.” or “D.I.T.”—for “Foreign (or Domes-tic) Independent Travel.” If you want to buy a vacation tour package all for yourself (that is, voyage alone and at will), this is actually offered as a “special feature.” It is described as an attractive new departure from the routine group ar-rangements, much as only a half century ago the group ex-cursion was offered as something special. The individualized package, the American Express chronicler explains, “is for individuals who prefer to travel alone rather than in a con-ducted group. A tour is planned to meet the particular speci-