Those Who Wander Open Debate #9
Is the Cost of Travel and Adventure the Primary Barrier to Seeing the World, or Is It Our High Standards?
“He who will not economize will have to agonize.”
-Confucius
Greetings fellow wanderers,
In August 2024, I introduced a new feature at Those Who Wander—a Those Who Wander Open Debate. Instead of a usual weekly post, I’m posting a monthly debate question, focused on various travel and adventure topics.
The format is simple. I will post a question for debate and pose a prompt about it. Then, there will be a poll and an opportunity to leave a comment to expand on your answer. Please feel free to respond at any length you like.
I will also repost the stats from the previous month’s poll. Last month, I asked, ‘Does travel and adventure make us less fearful? ‘ with 87% saying ‘Yes’, 7% saying ‘No’, and 7% answering ‘Unsure.’ Thank you to everyone who participated and shared your thoughts!
Now, onto today’s question and prompt:
Is the cost of travel and adventure the primary barrier to seeing the world, or is it our high standards?
I submit that if you’re living in the United States, chances are you are afforded a lot of opportunities to travel and explore. By the standards of history, we live in an incredibly abundant and privileged society. The claim that travel and adventure are outright “too expensive” doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. I suspect it has more to do with the fact that our culture does not value travel and adventure enough, and has much more to do with our high standards and expectations. As a whole, our society tends to place higher value on acquiring things like materialism, status, and security rather than intangible experiences derived from travel and adventure. When we look closely at how we spend our extra money, time, and attention, it becomes clear what our values are.
I once worked at a ski resort in Colorado, lugging food and beer up the mountain on snowcats. One day during lunch, my coworkers and I got on the topic of travel. Everyone was in agreement that they valued travel, but when I started to talk about my wife and I going to Italy recently, one of my smug coworkers cut me off with “Psssh, I wish I could go to Italy!” I tried to politely point out that it wasn’t because we were rich and spoiled, which is what I assumed his tone meant. (I was, after all, pushing heavy cargo around all day and stomping trash into dumpsters shoulder to shoulder with him). My wife and I save and budget incredibly well for our trips (much thanks to her savviness rather than mine), and that’s essentially all it takes, but he wasn’t hearing it.
I’ve encountered this same argument with many archaeology coworkers across the country. The interesting thing about being an archaeologist on the move is that you get to spend a lot of time with others and observe what many of us across the country spend our money and time on. Often, people in their younger years are splurging on cheap thrills and lots of nights at the bar. “Live fast and die young” may be cliché at this point, but it’s still the implicit perennial mantra of each passing younger generation. In just one night, a co-worker told us he had spent nearly $150 at the bar—a bar in the middle of nowhere, Montana, where beers were about $2.50 and well shots were close to $5, and I don’t recall them having a gourmet menu. They didn’t serve anything beyond crackers if memory serves, so I was astonished to learn how frivolous some of us can be with our finances.
To each their own, I say…except when these same folks start to moan about not being able to afford to travel. I believe, in addition to fear and uncertainty and our inability to take meaningful risks, our high standards—what we perceive travel and adventure to be—are a primary barrier that holds us back from seeing the world.
In a previous post, Is Uncertainty the Reason Americans Don’t Travel Far from Home? I examined the travel statistics of Americans and demonstrated that this travel data indicates Americans often do not travel far from home or experience diverse cultures abroad. As argued,
We are biased toward the Western Hemisphere. This makes sense since these destinations are typically cheaper, closer, less logistically challenging to navigate, and have no radical time zone changes to adjust to (especially important to parents with young kids like us). Nevertheless, the fact that 54% of Americans do not possess an active passport is intriguing for a nation of supposed immense wealth, opportunity, and influence.
There are legitimate reasons why someone cannot afford to travel much, and inflation in recent years has taken a toll on everyone’s budgets, so that cannot be discounted as a factor. Costs can be genuinely expensive. Go figure! For instance, it has been noted for some time that there is a positive correlation between income and the number of passport owners. Over a decade ago, in 2011, repeat traveler households reported $129,000 annual income, and the average cost of international airfare per person per trip was $1,237, with an additional average of $1,487 for expenditures. Now, it isn’t exactly news to find that the richer you are, the more likely it is to possess a passport and have the means to travel regularly. This is also true for education and several other political, economic, and cultural factors. Nevertheless, what is surprising, now in 2025, is that average airfare has remained constant at $1,237, and the average daily cost of a vacation is around $324, with lower budgets around $121 per day and luxury budgets around $923 per day.
However, these are just a few statistics, and anyone who’s looked at enough statistics by now knows they can vary widely. I don’t put as much stock into them as I used to, and only treat them as a rough estimate anyway. Besides, the larger point I’m attempting to make is that we should not read all this as a determination of our circumstances, nor let it deter those of us with less education or less money, because it could very well be our high standards that are driving up these prices and expectations. It’s also worth mentioning that there are plenty of websites nowadays, such as Pomelo and Going, that offer around-the-clock low airfare alerts and only require some diligence and quick action to snag up some incredibly low deals.
Also, it’s important to bear in mind that the cost of air travel has dropped significantly since the 1970s, and overall costs in other forms of transportation, like trains, buses, and vehicles, have become much more affordable to many of us. As far as expenses go while traveling, a lot of it depends on our standards and is, hence, something we fortunately have some control over. Lodging can hit a big chunk of our budget. Fortunately, most hostels around the world are reasonably cheap. We can also prepackage dry foods for meals, utilize public transportation, and seek out places that have free admission, such as museums. These are just a few options that can radically reduce expenses while abroad. Finding an Airbnb or smaller hotel on the outskirts of a town can also have a surprisingly big price drop. There are an overwhelming number of creative ways to be cost-effective in our adventures if we so choose to learn and adopt them.
When we examine our culture from a bird’s eye view, it’s easy to see how most of us prefer all the luxuries of home (televisions, streaming services, subscriptions, game consoles, cars, bigger houses, land, boats, guns, lots and lots of toys, and all the bills and insurance policies that we know will inevitably fasten themselves to those toys) while neglecting to put money away for adventures. But I suspect we will all get itchy feet someday in the future and have a sense of regret that we hadn’t prioritized that one adventure we’d wished we’d taken.
The fact that so many Americans choose to overburden themselves with all these material things versus experiences like travel and adventure indicates that many of us do indeed possess the means to wander, we just don’t value travel and adventure as much as we do our material culture. And part of that is because we assume so much of travel and adventure costs an arm and a leg, but it doesn’t have to, and it might have more to do with changing our habits and perspectives than anything else. If you want to scrounge up some easy money, look no further than the food in your trash can. The average American family throws away about $1500 of food annually. That’s a round-trip flight to just about anywhere in the world nowadays. Frugality can be your friend if you let it.
I will go out on a limb and say that for many Americans, it’s not that we can’t financially afford to go places; it is that we don’t prioritize or value it like we do our material items, and we’re not diligent enough with how we save and budget. As an author and an expert on the overworking and overspending American, Juliet B. Schor, elaborates on how many of us are locked in a vicious cycle of work and spending where we “see, want, borrow, buy” and repeat. Largely in the pursuit of status and obsessed with our self-image, we chase after luxury goods and fall into overwhelming debt, emulating lifestyles of those in our society that far exceed our bank accounts. We max out credit cards and take out endless loans for all the things we think we deserve with a shortsighted mindset that says “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Schor’s research has shown that “the more TV a person watches, the more he or she spends…what we see on TV inflates our sense of what’s normal.” All in all, we don’t seem willing to break out of this cycle and sacrifice some material possessions for something we perceive as a mere intangible experience, such as an adventure, despite how many of us dream of “seeing the world.”
There also tends to be a stigma that travel is only for the rich elitists. As the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin once famously opined,
“I’m not one of those who maybe come from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents get ’em a passport and give ’em a backpack and say go off and travel the world. Noooo. I worked all my life…I was not, uh, a part of, I guess, that culture.”
One might be surprised to find that backpacks and passports aren’t all that expensive, and most world travelers you meet aren’t garnished with Louis Vuitton boots and bags. Backpackers are some of the most financially conservative travelers you are going to find. And for the record, I’ve been working since I was fifteen, all through high school and college. I provided myself with my passport, plane tickets, and backpack, and am still years away from paying off student debt. Working as a contract archaeologist in the United States gets you not much more than $50,000 a year, and that’s factoring in your per diem. I’m here to call bullshit on the idea that one needs to be spoiled rich to travel and is exclusively for the haves.
Many of us, unfortunately, still fail to realize that many opportunities for adventure are incredibly inexpensive. In the four months my (now) wife and I spent on the Appalachian Trail (circa 2014), the two of us combined only spent around $2,500. That said, costs for a thru-hike can vary considerably. Some managed to do it around that time for under $1,000 for the entire length of six months by being incredibly thrifty. This is where savviness, frugality, and imagination come into play. It merely takes some ingenuity and willingness to prioritize finances and time if one desires to go somewhere and explore our world. If we can get ourselves out of the mindset of wanting to live like kings and queens everywhere we go, then perhaps we can whittle away the myths of travel being expensive and only for the well-off.
What are your thoughts? Is the cost of travel and adventure the primary barrier to seeing the world, or is it our high standards? Perhaps it is something else entirely.
Expand on your answer in the comments:
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me and participating in the discussion. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
The cost of travel isn't simply the expense of travelling itself, but the need to maintain your home based while you are away. Most of us don't have the privilege to step away from our everyday responsibilities for extended periods, especially if we're low paid, in insecure employment or juggling multiple jobs. There are always cheaper travel options, but reorganising your life to make travel possible can be beyond many of us.
This made me think of my niece who complains that she can't afford to buy a house. But she can afford a 6 week vacation every year (on top of other trips).
My husband and I just spent a year traveling in South America. We probably spent on average about $2000 a month. My original budget for lodging was $900 a month, but towards the end of our journey, that went up. The enviroment we were staying in became very important for my mental health. I needed big windows, private space, and modern accommodations. We stayed in hostels and cheap hotels every once in a while, but these kind of accommodations just weren't tenable long term for us (we are older, in our 60s). So yes, you can do things super cheap - but they might not be enjoyable.
My journey has been an inspiration for my friends, but no one is going to do what we do. Travel can be hard. Not being able to communicate in a foreign language makes things harder. We can get by with our Spanish, but we had no desire to journey to Brazil and have no language skills. We did our trip on the cheap, but it took lots of research to figure out buses and accommodations. I totally understand why people choose tours and all inclusive vacations despite their expense. It's just so much easier than standing on the side of the road loaded with backpacks waiting to wave down the right combi.
I think people who think they don't have enough money ey to travel - either are scraping by and really can't afford it, aren't interested enough to put in the work to travel cheaply, or have a hard time/don't want to leave their comfort zone.