By Elizabeth Sheeran
Thousands of young Americans have turned the shrinking economy into an opportunity for expanding their horizons.
With price wars on international airfares, and the global recession keeping a lid on prices on the ground, would-be globetrotters with a little money, a little time and a little sense of adventure are finding it's a great time to see the world.
"It's a good time to travel, because it is cheaper," said Riley Ohlson, 27, who in the past couple of years has travelled to Ireland and Central America, and who will spend two weeks this December in South America.
"If they can afford it without sacrificing their responsibilities, it's more do-able now than ever," said Eli Berger, a Harvard senior who spent last summer on the road researching the 2010 Guatemala edition of Let's Go, the series of international travel guides that bills itself as "the bible of the budget traveler."
With airfare to Guatemala City on a par with domestic plane tickets, Berger said he ran into plenty of young Americans taking advantage of cheap flights and even cheaper hostel prices to hike volcanoes, visit Mayan ruins and browse local handicraft markets.
At the Boston-area office of STA Travel, the world's largest specialist provider of international travel services for the student and young professionals market, branch manager Megan Dattoli said business has remained steady. "We're not seeing a dip in the number of travelers, but we've noticed that people are doing things a little bit differently, like traveling off-peak to save money," said Dattoli.
Lower airfares are just the ticket
"With prices so low on international travel, it is especially exciting to see that young people are really taking advantage of the great opportunities to travel right now," said Patrick Evans at STA's U.S. head office.
A recent survey of STA's largely under-30 clientele found that 30 percent were still planning to travel internationally within the next year despite the recession, and that cost was a major consideration.
Lower demand for business-related foreign travel has translated into airfare cuts of up to 45 percent for some overseas destinations, said Evans. Since the recession is a global phenomenon, there are also plenty of bargains to be found on destination-related expenses like hotels. "You can get as good a deal as ever on pretty much anywhere you want to go," said Evans.
For many young adults with international travel aspirations, it has become a matter of "if not now, then when?" especially for destinations that may have previously seemed out of reach.
"Australia is definitely a destination that has always been on the top the list in terms of aspirational travel: where people would go if they had an unlimited amount of funds and the time," said Evans. "It's always been at least $1,000 or more to fly there. Now you're looking at deals for $700 to $800, plus the Australian government is pushing working holiday visas so you can work to offset the cost of your trip."
With dimmer job prospects at home, more young Americans are looking into programs that allow them to stay longer at their destinations, like work study or volunteer projects, since they're less worried about falling off the fast track while they're away. "Among my peers, there's some of that mindset that 'I might as well do it now, while the job market is awful anyway.' " said Ohlson.
And it's not just the already-initiated who are taking advantage of current travel deals. Berger said aggressive online marketing of discounted fares reaches young adults who may not have been looking to travel abroad. "If they're searching domestic fares and they see an ad pop up for $150 each way to Paris, they're going to click on it, and now they're thinking about going to Paris." said Berger.
Airfare is almost always the largest expense for international travel, so lower airfares go a long way toward breaking down what industry professionals say is always the biggest barrier to overseas travel: the perception that it's more expensive than vacationing closer to home.
Cheaper than staying home
"People usually stay at home because they think it's going to be cheaper to fly to Florida and stay there. But that's not really true," said Ashley Laporte, marketing director of Let's Go Publications, a Harvard student agency. Laporte said that's especially the case for anyone paying admission to Florida theme parks, but even a Florida beach vacation can offer less value for the money.
"You can go to Paris, spend $15 a night to stay in a hostel, eat baguettes in your room, and go to museums on the days that they're free, and you'll have a much more enriching experience than taking a flight down to Florida to sit on the beach," said Laporte.
International travelers often find it's easy to experience a lot without spending a lot of money at their destination, said Joe Molimock, a junior at Harvard who researched the upcoming edition of "Let's Go France." "The sight is the place itself. It's not what you're used to, so it's entertaining already."
Would-be globetrotters need to look beyond the cost of airfare alone, said Laura Imkamp, 21, who recently traveled to Cambodia. "Asia is very cheap, so the expensive part of that is the flight. And the flight is very intimidating, but then once you get there you can find somewhere really cheap to stay. The food is basically nothing. You can get a really good meal for one or two dollars.
"You just have to think of it in those terms, because if you base it on the flight alone, you think, 'well, the flight's expensive, so it's going to be way more,' but if you factor in food costs and transportation costs and hotel costs and this and that, a lot of domestic trips are just as expensive if not more than overseas, if you just skimp a little bit when you're overseas," said Imkamp.
Expenses can be a little more challenging in some of the more popular overseas destinations with higher living costs, like London, Paris or Amsterdam, especially since the dollar has fallen against the Euro.
But Evans said there's still such thing as an affordable European vacation, since Europe offers a lot of budget accommodation options, especially relative to downtown hotels in larger U.S. cities. There's also been deep discounting on package deals.
"Last summer the cost of a six-day package to Ireland, including a good deal on airfare, was the same as a trip to Disneyland, or even New York," said Evans. "If you can do a little bit of planning and you're pretty savvy with finding deals, you could definitely make it comparable. It would probably take a little more effort, but you can definitely make it happen."
And Imkamp, who regularly travels to Europe to visit family, said free or cheap options like couchsurfing and ridesharing have grown in popularity among young European travelers, thanks to online networks that help travelers share information.
If anything, said Evans, the falling dollar has encouraged more young travelers to look off the beaten path. Ohlson said he and a friend ruled out European destinations when planning their upcoming trip abroad, and eventually decided on Peru, "partially because of the strong Euro and how weak the dollar is, so Peru had a little bit of a leg up there, because its currency was a little weaker." said Ohlson.
Hooked on globetrotting
No one knows exactly how many young Americans travel abroad every year. But most industry professionals say the number of young Americans with global wanderlust is growing. "There's definitely an increase in young people's interest in travelling and experiencing cultures that are different. It's this generation getting more comfortable culturally," said Evans.
A 2007 Pew Center study of young adults - the so-called Generation Next - found them to be more comfortable with diversity and more globally connected than any generation before them. The first generation to come of age in a post-Internet world has also been called the first global generation. Quite literally, they have the world at their fingertips, with access to all kinds of resources that bridge the cultural and practical obstacles to foreign travel.
And more Americans are going to college, where they have access to study abroad programs. "They do their study abroad and then they want to do everything," said STA's Dattoli, "People get the travel bug and they keep coming back." Dattoli said it's fairly typical for students to book what they consider to be their trip of a lifetime, only to become repeat customers. "We book a lot of honeymoons," she said.
Courtney Watts, 24, went to Paris on a college Spring Break program last year. "It definitely opened my eyes to different cultures," said Watts, who is already working on plans to visit Germany and Italy on her own in the near future, "I was definitely nervous, because I had never been on a vacation without my parents, but by the time I got there I loved it, and I finally realized I was ready to leave and be okay."
Many young travelers use the word "addiction" to describe their desire to see the world. "Often it only takes one time for people to get hooked," said Berger of Let's Go. "It's also just as easy to figure out quickly that it's not for you, but that's the exception rather than the rule."
Let's Go has a loyal contingent of readers in their 30s and 40s who first used the guides while travelling in college, said Laporte, and she expects the current wave of converts to foreign travel will find a way to keep going abroad despite limited resources and regardless of ups and downs in the economic climate.
"We've got 50 years of writing for people who are trying to head to Europe with $100 in their pockets. When you're already trying to travel without having a lot of money, a recession doesn't change that," said Laporte. "We have a saying at Let's Go: 'It's not the money in your pocket that's holding you back, it's the limits of your imagination.'"
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