boorstin9

Frcrm Traveler to Tourist:

and after the war its travel department grew spectacularly. By 1961 American Express, serving tourists everywhere, had 279 offices throughout the world.

American Express sent the first postwar escorted tour to Europę in October, 1919. Soon afterwards the first Mediter-ranean cruise went out in the Cunard liner Caronia, under joint control of American Express and Cook’s. In 1922 American Express dispatched the first all-water round-the-world pleasure cruise in the Laconia. Afterwards a similar cruise was arranged every year. The great backwash had be-gun. Americans were returning to the Old World in the great tourist invasions of Europę which have fluctuated with our domestic fortunes, but which in recent years have been greater than ever before.

By the middle of the twentieth century, foreign travel had become big business. It was a prominent feature of the American standard of living, an important element in our cultural and financial relations with the rest of the world. In 1957, for example, about ten million American residents spent over two billion dollars on international travel. Of these travelers, 1.5 million went overseas. For the summer of 1961 alone, it was estimated that 800,000 Americans were visiting Europę and were spending there about seven hundred, million dollars.

Foreign travel now had, of course, become a Like any other inass-produced commodity, it cou in) bargainj packages and on thć) installment plan

commodity. « d be bought , .

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It was eon- i ';^£

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sidered a strange and noteworthy event, a _f peculiar guirk, when Charles Sumner in early nineteenth-century Boston borrowed money from a couple of old friends who had faith in his futurę, to finance his tour of Europę. Nowadays morę and morę travelers take the trip before they can pay for it.

“Go Now, Pay Later.” Your travel agent will arrange it for

_y°^u-    _/

•y    When travel is no longer madę to order but is(ian assembly-

i~ line.jstore-boughten commodity, we have less to say about what goes into it. And we know less and less about what we

9¹

The Lost Art of Trtruel

) are buying. We buy so many days of vacation pleasure with-out even knowing what is in the package. Recently on a lec-ture tour I flew into Hyderabad, a city in central India, of which I had not even heard a year before. Seated beside me on the piane were a tired, elderly American and his wife. He was a real estate broker from Brooklyn. I asked him what was interesting about Hyderabad. He had not the slightest notion. He and his wife were going there because the place was “in the package.” Their tour agent had guaranteed to include only places that were “world famous,” and so it must be.

A well-packaged tour must include insurance^against risks. J In this sense the dangers of travel have become obiolSte; We fouy safetyjand peace of mind right in the package. Some-body else covers all the risks. In 1954 the suspense-thriller movie The High and ihe Mighty depicted the troubled flight of a luxury air liner from San Francisco to Honolulu. The assorted vacationers aboard were flying to the mid-Pacific for a week or two of relaxation. As the engines failed, the nerves of the passengers began to fray. Finally, in order to keep the piane in the air, the captain ordercd the baggage ₍jettisoned. I saw this movie in a suburban theatre outside of Chicago. Beside me sat a mother and her young son. He seemed relatively unperturbed at the mortal risks of the passengers, but when the plane’s purser began tossing into the ocean the elegant vacation paraphemalia—fancy suitcases, hatboxes, portable typewriters, golf clubs, tennis rackets— the boy became agitated. “What will they do?” the boy ex-claimed. “Don’t worry,” comforted the mother. “It’s all in-sured.”

When the traveler’s risks are insurable he has become a tourist.

III

The traveler used to go about the world |o encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to- prevent this