Travel has always been an aspirational thing: people travel to see stuff, sure. But they also travel as a flex, and to brag about their travel. That's cool, nothing against any of it.
But I'm wondering if the appeal is going to decline, if it hasn't already.
A friend of mine suggested he might take his family to Chile over christmas. My first (and internal response) was..."why"? Fifty years ago, I could maybe see a couple of pictures of Chile in a library or something. Today, I can see almost every square inch of Chile with youtube and google image search. I can find a Chilean restaurant in Calgary probably to experience at least an approximation of the food.
None of this is the same as going to see these places and experience them of course, but the delta between the in-person experience and what you can attain through technology is relatively small, and will be getting smaller every day. So it seems to me that the real cost of the price of the vacation and the immense wasted time in the process of moving your meat popsicle halfway around the world might not be worth the end result. The end result being: "looks like the pictures on the internet'.
I think the mystery and romance of travel is drying up.
So what are we left with? Flexing on facebook? Using it as a form of escapism?
The climate change savages are coming after air travel next. I predict that travel and the car market are going to follow a similar trend: they are both going to be genericized by technology. Buying an aspirational car and going on an aspirational trip will be the same: the juice won't be worth the squeeze.