International Travel Way Up

Yours truly was featured in an article in USAToday this past Wednesday, giving advice on where the US dollar will still go far. Read it here .

The paper published an excellent special section on international travel and in a rare departure for the major travel media, it wasn’t all about spas, five-star hotels, and package tours. There’s a great piece on traveling solo (with helpful links), a listing of some good travel blog sites (including BootsNAll), a rundown on budget airlines in Europe, and a relatively balanced article about government travel warning sites. Do a search on their site or just go to the travel section and browse.

The lead story , however, was all about how international travel from the US has been taking off lately and is now back to where it was before the 9/11 attacks. Some 49,200 flights now leave the US mainland each month bound for international destinations.

For we travelers who have been going abroad the past few years anyway, this inspires some mixed feelings. On the one hand I’m glad to see my fellow Americans getting out of their shell and venturing abroad, plus I’m glad to see an uptick in business in those areas that can really use it.

On the other hand I fear the great deals we’ve been seeing the past few years may get scaled back as demand increases. At some point we’ll move from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market, at least in a macro sense.

Perhaps a few people are taking my advice about avoiding Europe and heading to Asia or Latin America instead. Flights to Asia are up 17 percent over a year ago, as are flights to Central America and Mexico. That makes a lot of sense-the dollar’s troubles against the Euro have had little to no impact in those areas. (If you’re heading to either place with pounds or Euros in your pocket of course, you’re really getting a deal.)

One business traveler in the article noted that he paid $330 for “an ordinary airport hotel” in Frankfurt and spent $120 for a taxi from the airport to his hotel in Milan. Ouch. Promise a taxi driver $120 in Indonesia and he’ll probably take you from one tip of Java to the other! Hand $330 to a hotel owner in Nicaragua and he’ll probably give you his best suite for a week!