Welcome to the future: We've come a long way in the last two decades of travels. Photo / Getty Images.
Think back to 1997. A time before Google, before Facebook, before smartphones. Almost unimaginable, isn't it?
It was the year New Labour founded Cool Britannia, the YBAs ran riot, Harry Potter first waved his wand, that Aqua sang Barbie Girl and Hong Kong was handed back to China.
Richard Godwin tracks the ways our travel world has changed since then.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, how do we know it made a sound? Likewise: if an influencer visits a five-star resort in Tulumand and no one sees the Instagram live stream of their poolside tacos, can we really say they've been on holiday?
Digital technology – notably the iPhone – has transformed the experience of booking a holiday, and it's also changed what it's like to be on holiday. You can navigate cities with Google Maps as opposed to a torn-out page from your guidebook. You can shoot, edit and then publish the highlights of your holiday in real time – no more waiting around in Snappy Snaps.
Glastonbury 1997 was a high-water mark for the British music festival. It was the year the BBC took over the coverage, broadcasting all the bucolic post-Britpop hedonism into the nation's living rooms, and popularising the idea that al-fresco rock'n'roll was precisely what your summer needed. It wasn't long before Glastonbury was claimed as part of the 'season' alongside Glyndebourne and Ascot. Hunter wellies became the new Jimmy Choos. Trenchfoot became the new gout.
In the Golden Age of air travel, you could step aboard the BOAC and light up a big fat cigar. Hell, in the pre-9/11 era, you could even carry on a bottle of water onboard without having it sternly confiscated. You even got to keep your shoes on!
The arcane baggage restrictions of the budget airlines, the enforced separation of minors because you didn't do the online check-in properly, and the suspicion that it's all a ruse to sell lots of tiny 100ml bottles of shower gel does take the joy out of flying somewhat. All this technology. But the queues are worse than ever.
The desire to eat well is as good a reason as any to travel. When a restaurant has three stars, according to the Michelin Guide, that officially means it's vaut le voyage – worth a trip in itself.
In recent years, a new breed of gastro-traveller has started taking that literally. Not that they pay much heed to the stuffy old Michelin Guide anymore. Their itineraries owe more to Netflix's The Chef's Table and the World's 50 Best Restaurants list.
The emergence of low-cost airlines in the late 1990s didn't just transform the way we holiday, elevating the weekend city-break above the week-long holiday. It affected everything from suitcase design (compact) to British pre-nuptial rituals (why settle for the nightspots of Loughborough when you could go zorbing in Latvia?).
The opening up of 99p routes to obscure airstrips in rural France also enabled British baby-boomers to buy up all the gites and turn the Dordogne into East Sussex.
Funny to think that we used to be happy to book a week's holiday based on a couple of pictures and superlatives in a high-street travel agent. We didn't feel the need to first consult at least 156 Expedia reviews. Back in the late 1990s, a flick through the Lonely Planet was about as much research as was deemed necessary.
The Ibizan people are a remarkably tolerant bunch. It is only this year that they have begun to complain that, actually, there are only so many fishbowls and Tinie Tempah residencies that one island can take.
Never mind, though. There are now plenty of islands in its image. Ayia Napa in Cyprus. Hvar in Croatia. Koh Phan Ngan in Thailand. Mykonos in Greece. Love Island.
And if you want to get away from all the mindless hedonism, you can always retreat to… Ibiza, the new home for mindful hedonism. As the island's original house kids have grown up, the island has evolved to suit their tastes: locavore tasting menus, beachside yoga retreats, boutique farm-stays. And maybe just the one cheeky night at Pacha for old time's sake.
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Hopefully, the more you see of the world, the more intense your desire will be to preserve it from pillage and exploitation. But here's a sad little irony. The more flights you have taken, the more towels you have left on hotel floors, the more plastic bottles of water you have emptied, the more World Heritage Sites your footsteps have eroded, the greater your own negative impact has been.
This has led to a welcome amount of soul-searching on the part of tour operators and genuine efforts to offset the environmental impact of mass travel. It's also led to a weird stretching of the word 'eco'. Flying to a five-star St Lucian resort on a Blue Planet II-inspired diving expedition isn't quite in the spirit, is it? Oh but the Piña Coladas you sip between visits to the coral reef are organic – so it's OK, right?
Coachloads of Chinese travellers throng in Trier, Germany, every year as it is the birthplace of Karl Marx. China accounted for one 10th of the world's 1.7 billion foreign trips made in 2017. By 2030, that's predicted to rise to one quarter.
Cyprus, Egypt and the Côte d'Azur are full of Russian visitors. London roars to the sound of supercars in the summer as Qataris, Emiratis and Saudis flee the summer heat and rack up parking tickets outside Harrods. Nigerian, Chinese and Indian shoppers increasingly keep the world's shopping malls in business.
Back in 1997, Shoreditch in London was not a shorthand for a hip lifestyle but a sketchy domain of disused warehouses, run-down housing and people who actually made art as opposed to marketed art. You could have said the same thing about Williamsburg in New York, or Silverlake in Los Angeles, or Belleville in Paris, or any number of inner city 'hoods that now abound in pernickety coffee places and kombucha microbreweries and me-lancers with tiny skateboards.
The remarkable thing is how borderless the movement is. It usually turns out there's a Shoreditch of Belgrade, that avocado toast is also a 'thing' in Sao Paolo, and the owner of your Melbourne AirBnB also reads Elena Ferrante, listens to Grimes, and worries about gentrification. Home from home!
There are two types of traveller. The first is the type who can't understand why you'd not want to go to Dubai. It's sunny. It's sandy. It's safe. It's air-conditioned. The police drive Ferraris. There's a gold vending machine. It contains the 160-floor Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and the Burj Al Arab, the 'world's most luxurious hotel', where every guest is presented with a 24-carat gold iPad. You can buy an $800 diamond cocktail! Oh – and it's full of shopping malls.
Then there are those who cannot understand why you would ever want to go to Dubai. It's sterile. It's expensive. It's segregated. It's an environmental catastrophe. You can get arrested for kissing. Oh – and it's full of shopping malls.
Either way, the City of Gold has become the beacon of a global age of excess.
A month inter-railing around Europe used to involve losing a small fortune in commission as you changed drachma for lira for schillings for Deutschemarks for guilders for francs for peseta for escudo. It also used to mean traveller's cheques, money belts and frantically using up all your change on Chupa Chups at the border, since when were you likely to be in the Netherlands again?
But then on 1 January 2002, the Euro was introduced in 11 European Union member states and is now the currency of 19 (count them: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain).
We can debate the political merits of having a currency union without a fiscal union if you want (I don't…) but one thing is certain. It has made visiting Europe so much less of a headache.
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