We Need To Start Traveling Again

When is the last time you traveled?

I’m not just talking about leaving your home, eating nice food, and snapping some selfies in front of TripAdvisor’s “top things to do” list for wherever in the world.

I mean: When is the last time you had an unexpected conversation with a stranger in a foreign countryside, trying to communicate with nothing more than well-meaning gestures and a friendly smile?

When is the last time you’ve arrived in a country or a region to challenge the narrative of what corporate news and media have to say about a place? When is the last time you woke up and thought, “I don’t know what’s happening today,” or “I don’t know where I’m going next”?

That, my friends, is travel. And whether it’s for ourselves or the places we claim to love, we need to start traveling again.

Travel changes you

There are over a billion international tourists in the world. That’s roughly an eighth of the world’s population. But how many of those tourists are travelers? Is there even a difference?

I’d argue: Yes. Yes, there is. But not in a pretentious way meant to shame anyone who is a tourist. The difference is merely in how you travel within a wide spectrum of the Carnival Cruiser who leaves nothing to chance to the solo backpacker scrounging barbecued crickets to survive the night.

Humans are built to seek out comfort and lower risk as much as possible. But leaning too far on tourist comforts — four- and five-star hotels all along the well-trodden tourist path — keeps us away from some of the most fulfilling life experiences we can have through travel. And it’s those experiences that leave the biggest mark on you. As Anthony Bourdain put it:

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly; you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

Travel is a privilege

Travel is an enormous privilege; namely the freedom — whether financial, time, or simply having the passport to do so. Those with that privilege owe it to themselves to see the world as it truly is, not merely the highlights ripped off of an Instagram Reel, staying away from the places and people mass media tell you to fear.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being a tourist. When I’m noshing on a cinnamon roll in Helsinki or slurping down ramen in Tokyo, I am a tourist.

But too many of us are exclusively tourists. Yet before the birth of mass tourism in the 1950s and ‘60s, almost anyone who left the comfort of home was a traveler. The tourism infrastructure wasn’t there to cater to your every wish and whim, coddling you with all the comforts of home in a faraway land.

Now we can leave home, fly across the world, and pay to stay within a protective bubble of exclusive hotels, resorts, and neighborhoods molded like clay to cater to tourists. So much so, this is the only kind of travel many of us know — and it’s leading to less fulfilling, memorable experiences. Even worse, it’s hurting the places we claim to love by damaging the environment, displacing residents, eroding culture, and straining local infrastructure.

Overtourism

In 2012, total annual international tourist arrivals reached over 1 billion for the first time in history. With the exception of the pandemic, international tourist arrivals have only increased year after year, reaching over 1.4 billion in 2024 and 2025.

This increase in tourists has, not coincidentally, coincided with an increase in overtourism. Here you can see the frequency of the word “overtourism” in English-speaking books. The first jump comes in 2011-2012, right when the United Nations World Tourism Organization started celebrating the billionth international tourist in a single year.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines overtourism as “the situation when too many people visit a place on holiday, so that the place is spoiled and life is made difficult for the people who live there.” As examples, they point to Venice, Barcelona, and Bali.

Venice, for example, sees tens of millions of tourists annually with an average of roughly 80,000 per day. In response, a day-visitor fee has been implemented to help manage overcrowding, and cruise ship access is restricted in the historic center to protect the lagoon and reduce the sudden surge of thousands of passengers from docking ships.

Still, residents are left feeling like they’re being pushed out of their own city. The same goes for Barcelona, where locals have responded to the pressure by hitting tourists with water guns. On Bali, locals fought back against a 182-meter glass elevator construction meant to transport tourists more easily down to Kelingking Beach.

These problems can be alleviated, if not entirely removed, if more of us start to travel again.

“Be a traveler, not a tourist.”

Maybe you’ve seen this shot of Anthony Bourdain smoking a cigarette in front of a piece of paper that reads in all caps, “BE A TRAVELER, NOT A TOURIST!”

Anthony Bourdain personified the adventurous globetrotter who, many agreed, traveled the right way by avoiding the tourist traps and cultural voids of colossal cruises and walled off resorts built on stolen land. Instead, he would travel off the beaten path, get into the bones of a place, talk with people, break bread with them, and try to walk away with a better understanding of the culture and place he was privileged to experience. No episode exemplifies this spirit more than his 2013 Jerusalem episode where he eats with an Israeli settler and later, a Gazan family.

Something of a travel cult has since grown around Bourdain, especially in the years after his tragic death in 2018. People will travel to some of the more memorable locations from his television shows, like this bun chá spot in Hanoi where he famously sat down with then-President Obama. It’s become such an unintended attraction, the owners have encased the table where they sat with tour groups shuffling through to see where the famous lunch went down. This even caught his attention and he posted a photo of it on his Instagram writing, “Not sure how I feel about this.”

Unfortunately we can’t ask him ourselves, but I don’t think it’s such a wild assumption to presume he wouldn’t be a fan of people glorifying how and where he traveled, unintentionally turning local favorites into tourist hot spots. This is something he addressed in a 2016 interview with Fresh Air.

DAVIES: Do you care about the reactions you get from the locals after the episodes appear?

BOURDAIN: I care about the - yes. I - what I want to happen ideally - and it’s so weird. It’s a double-edged sword. Ideally, I’ll go to a place like - I’ll find a little bar in Rio, let’s say, some little local place that perfectly expresses the neighborhood. You know, it’s not on the - it’s not a tourist-friendly place. It’s, for lack of a better word - I hate this word, but I’ll use it anyway - authentic. I’ll feature that on the show. The response I’m looking for is to hear from someone from the neighborhood saying, how did you ever find that place? I thought only we knew about it. It’s, you know, a - truly a place that we love and is reflective of our culture and our neighborhood.

But on the other hand, that’s kind of a destructive process because if I name the place - and I don’t always when it’s a place like that - I’ve changed it. The next time I go back, there’s tourists. There’s people who’ve seen it on the show. And then I might hear from the same person from that neighborhood say, you ruined my favorite bar, (laughter) you know? All the regular customers have run away. And it’s filled with, you know, tourists in ugly T-shirts and flip-flops.

We’re all tourists

Bourdain was a traveler, not a tourist. A tourist, we’ve decided, is the antithesis to a traveler. A tourist is someone who travels to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun, far-removed from any semblance of Mexican culture. They travel in an air-conditioned bubble meant to keep the local culture at arm’s length, something that can be observed from a safe distance. They stick with the tried-and-true favorites of a country that have been written about ad nauseam in each and every top 10 listicle.

The thing is, the actual definition of a traveler and a tourist are virtually one and the same. We’ll stick with Cambridge for consistency. To them, a traveler is simply someone who travels. A tourist is someone who visits a place for pleasure and interest, usually while on holiday.

We’ve created these differences between a traveler and a tourist ourselves. I’d argue we’ve done so to justify our style of travel at a time when tourists aren’t particularly welcome in certain places suffering from overtourism.

Graffiti that reads “Tourist, go home!” doesn’t hit as hard when you see yourself as a traveler, not a tourist. But in reality, if you’re strolling along Las Ramblas in Barcelona and can read the sign that says, “tourist, go home!” you, my friend, are a tourist. And that’s okay! I am fortunate to travel for a living and I’m more often than not, a tourist. There’s a reason why tourists exist — and that’s because there simply are places in the world that are so magnificent and spellbinding, they’re worth seeing in person.

Take the Acropolis in Athens, for example. In a peak year, it’ll see over seven million tourists, making it one of the most visited national monuments in the world, ahead of the Eiffel Tower and Taj Mahal.

Before my first visit to Athens, I convinced myself that I wouldn’t go to the Acropolis. That’s something for a tourist, not a traveler. I pictured Bourdain himself, patting me on the back for my highfalutin values.

Fortunately, my wife insisted — and I’ve been enthralled by Ancient Greece ever since. In fact, later this year I’ll spend about a week running across the Peloponnese for a story that digs into the ancient history and mythology embedded into the region. My tourist experience will lead directly to a travel experience.

For that reason, I do think it’s helpful to make a distinction between travelers and tourists — not to shame tourists out of existence, but rather to encourage people to own when they’re being a tourist and to also travel again; to find the courage to wander into parts unknown, stumble through a conversation with a villager, and for god’s sake, to cross a border on land instead of hopping around on a plane, ducking briefly into the capital city so you can check another country off the list.

Tourists are missing out

People are afraid. They’re afraid for their safety in traveling to lesser-known-destinations, of wasting money, and vacation days. That abundance of caution forces tourists to stick to the well-trodden path: all-inclusive resorts or re-tracing city tours you’ve already seen in your favorite YouTuber’s video. But that caution, as Jen Murphy writes in her Bloomberg essay, “Taking Predictable Vacations Is Bad for Your Brain,” costs us experience, perspective, and even emotional fulfillment.

For proof, she turns to Alex Hutchinson, author of 2018’s bestseller, Endure, and most recently, The Explorer’s Gene — an investigation into how exploration, uncertainty, and risk shape our behavior and help us find meaning.

“I think there’s a distinction between traveling actively and traveling passively,” Hutchinson explains. “If we were to offer a criticism of the experience of tourism rather than traveling, it’s that if it becomes too passive, you’re not experiencing things in the same way. If you’re not making some decisions following your own instincts as to what’s interesting to you, then it gets closer and closer to sitting on the sofa and just watching the screen go by with no agency and no interaction and no risk and no decisions. When you’re somewhere where you don’t know what’s around the next corner, you have to decide, am I going to go right or am I going to go left? And I really believe that traveling and living and experiencing things actively is a much more rewarding and interesting way of doing it.”

He continues, explaining what that explorer’s gene is and how can travel can give us meaning:

“There is a gene called the DRD4 gene that affects or determines how one of the dopamine receptors in your brain works. And you can trace the function of that gene all the way back to sort of 50,000 years ago when humans started to migrate out from their origins in Africa and the Near East. One of the reasons that we are everywhere, that we are on Easter Island and in the Canadian Arctic and in New Zealand and wherever else, we don’t just go and explore when we don’t have enough food, but we really want to know what’s over the horizon or around the corner or over that mountain.”

Hutchinson explains that the dopamine circuitry in our brains pushes us towards pursuing certain experiences that, when resolved or completed, are satisfying because they are interesting and meaningful.

“It feels meaningful to push ourselves into places where we don’t know what’s going to happen and then to find out what’s going to happen. We don’t love the feeling of uncertainty, we love the feeling of resolving uncertainty. And so the explorer’s gene is something that drives us to put ourselves in situations where we don’t know how it’s going to turn out so that we have the pleasure of finding out how it does turn out.”

I can look at my own travels to see just how wildly true this sentiment is. My most meaningful travel experiences didn’t come from running around the Eiffel Tower, but from the places that raise an eyebrow or two from family and friends back home. For me, it began with a week-long trip around El Salvador, a place I was warned against going, literally told I’d be shot as soon as I stepped off the plane.

But that trip showed me the value in truly traveling off the beaten path and I can draw a straight line from that trip to my adventures in Jordan, Oman, Israel and Palestine, motorbiking around the rice paddies of Vietnam and Laos, fastpacking through the arctic Finnish wilderness, and running across the high desert plateaus of Nepal. These are the experiences that embed themselves into my DNA, changing how I feel about myself and the world.

Travel is safer than you think

Now let’s talk about safety. This is one of the primary concerns people have when booking a trip to a lesser-known destination. But concerns about safety are largely based on feeling and not statistically justified. A 2025 study analyzed unnatural deaths of U.S. citizens abroad over a long period. The peak we hit was 1,065 deaths in 2010. Looking at that same year, international tourism data from the United Nations World Tourism Organization indicates that there were around 162 million outbound international tourism departures by U.S. residents in 2010.

So 0.0000065% of U.S. overseas travelers died of unnatural causes in 2010. Compare that with everyday dangers we generally write off, like driving a car. That same year, 32,885 people were killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes in the United States — the lowest number of traffic fatalities in the U.S. since 1949 at that time. But still, it was roughly 31 times more than U.S. tourists abroad.

Of course, stats don’t always temper feelings, regardless if they’re rational or not. I’ve felt creeped out, anxious, and even scared during different points of various travels. Black travelers have reported racist harassment while traveling and women especially have their own experiences of feeling unsafe or just generally made uncomfortable by men bothering them. None of this is likely to convince someone to jump off the tourist trek.

Finding your travel tribe

Fortunately, there’s plenty of gray area between an all-inclusive, walled off resort and wild camping in bear country or jumping straight into a country recovering from war. You can sign up for small group tours led by experienced travelers who will get you out of your comfort zone with virtually no real risk of actual danger. At least, none more than so than getting into a car back home.

There are companies that organize small group and solo-friendly tours around the world for every comfort level, whether you’re looking for an outdoor adventure, cultural immersion off the beaten path, or a mix of both. You can find outfitters that work with exclusively women, LGBTQ+ travelers, travelers living with a disability, Black travelers — you name it.

Maybe this is stating the obvious, but you also don’t have to fly halfway across the world to travel. Some of Bourdain’s most compelling episodes were traveling to places like the Ozarks and West Virginia within his relative backyard of the United States. Not to mention, there are travelers coming up with unique ways to explore their region, like Adam here who’s built a little niche of traveling around using exclusively public transportation, or Allison Anderson who, in addition to traveling the world, also finds herself off the tourist trek throughout her home country.

You can also mitigate any fears or uncertainty you have about a place by learning about it before going there. A tourist rolls into their Cancun resort without ever cracking open a book or watching anything about Mexican history or culture. But a traveler will read books, listen to podcasts, or watch films about a place before hitting the tarmac. You might say you don’t have time to do any of that beforehand, but if we agree that travel is a privilege, isn’t learning before going the least we can do? Besides, these days you can find rich, informative videos about any country and its history in bite-sized YouTube videos. There’s no longer any excuse to travel with complete ignorance.

Bourdain didn’t travel solo

As cool as someone like Bourdain looked while traveling the Congo, Paraguay, or Iran, he wasn’t on his own. Our solo travel hero didn’t travel alone. He had a production team and fixers from the region to help him navigate language barriers, safety issues, and cultural complexities. So while a true solo adventure is an admirable goal to work up to, there’s no shame with starting to get outside of the tourist box by signing up for a small group tour led by experienced professionals alongside a group of like-minded, culturally curious travelers.

Because our modern lives have turned our free time into a precious, limited commodity, there will always be the pressure to get the most out of that time. It’s admittedly easier to just be a tourist and follow a tried-and-true path. But as Bourdain himself said, “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts; it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you.”

That’s what we’re missing out on when we exclusively travel as a tourist. We miss the opportunity to slow down, to feel every beautiful and aching moment of the journey, and perhaps most importantly, to learn from the places we’re privileged to visit.