The year 2025 is ending, bye bye. Whether it was your best year or your worst, it’s over. It’s time for 2026, as we climb into the second quarter of the 21st century. It’s been a wild year, and a wild quarter century, no doubt about it. But we’re here! We made it.
No matter what else is going on in the world, travel just keeps on keepin’ on. Travel has a life of its own, independent of anything else that is going on. It almost exists in a world of its own. No matter what obstacles or problems may pop up, travel just finds another channel.
The human drive for travel, exploration, movement, is so strong that it is never thwarted. Like water, you can plug it up in one place, but you won’t stop it, you’ll only divert it. It will find another channel, and it will just keep moving on.
Animals have all different kinds of fascinating migratory behavior. The arctic terns fly from the Arctic to the Antarctic every year, 50,000 miles straight through Europe and Africa. And they do it without technological assistance. The sweet little monarch butterflies travel 3,000 miles from Canada to Mexico. A million and a half wildebeests migrate every year in a 500-mile circle through the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, and the list goes on. But certainly, humans top the list for the ubiquitousness of our travel behavior.
Humans have taken migration to another level. We are relentless. We’ve put ourselves all over the planet and we keep moving incessantly. If there are any places that we don’t yet inhabit or somehow utilize, someone is trying to do it now. There’s just no way to over-exaggerate the human drive for travel.
There are as many motivations for travel as there are people. People have historically migrated in search of food, or to escape disaster or war. But that would only account for a tiny amount of human travel on this planet, especially today. People often migrate to improve their lives, which pretty much accounts for the immigrant ancestors of nearly all Americans. We Americans are a restless bunch by nature, by our ancestry and history. But most travel today is not migration. I think the overriding motive for traveling is exploration.
Some exploration is a search for resources, with an economic motivation. But most exploration is just for itself. Humans have an insatiable drive to explore. Now since the rise of international jet travel in the 1960s, and with ever-increasing effectiveness, “ordinary people” (if there is such a thing), can travel to almost any place they can think of. And it’s easier than ever.
Consider that South Africa, one of my favorite destinations, is approximately 8,000 miles from New York. That’s a third of the way around the circumference of the earth. Opposite hemispheres, opposite seasons. It developed independently for its entire existence until the European colonization of the last few centuries. And even since that time, South Africa remained extremely remote and foreign to all but a very few Americans.
In the 19th century, the trip from New York to South Africa by sailing ship would take six to eight weeks. With the rise of steamships in the late 19th century, the travel time came down to three or four weeks.
Not many people took that trip, which was part of what made Mark Twain’s first book “The Innocents Abroad” – his travelogue of his trip to Europe and Africa in 1867 – such a sensation. He was one of the first to have a global view.
Luxury liners in the early 1900s could make the trip in 21-28 days. After the post-World War II rise of the passenger aircraft industry, a propeller aircraft could make the trip in 30-40 hours, spread over multiple days with several refueling stops and overnight layovers.
Now today, flights from New York to Cape Town or Johannesburg take 14-16 hours. I just checked the prices on roundtrip fares New York-Johannesburg and found them from $451. That means South Africa is now accessible to most Americans. It’s like discovering a parallel country that developed on another planet. A great discovery awaits.
When a semester’s tuition ranges from $4,500 – $6,000 at public universities to $15,000 –$23,000 at private colleges, $451 is within the affordable range for many people who can’t afford higher education. And since travel is more vibrantly and dynamically educational than any classroom I was ever in, that’s quite a value proposition.
Homo sapiens meant “wise man.” Not sure how well we have lived up to that name. I propose a new name for the species we have evolved into: Homo viator: “Man the traveler” or “Travelin’ Man.”
This year, with more political and economic upheaval, war, famine, natural disasters, etc. than you can name, travel just kept right on going, with travelers exploring farther and deeper.
The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) reported record-level global travel spending in 2025. The global travel industry grew by 5-7 percent. Spending in Europe was expected to rise by 11 percent, according to Reuters. Inbound travel to the US dropped by 6.3 percent, the first decline since the pandemic recovery.
People are evolving in how they travel. Some of the movement is back and forth and haphazard, but some trends are solid and consistent. One trend that continues solidly is people wanting more immersive, authentic, interactive travel experiences. And closely related to that, sustainable travel is increasingly a requirement by travelers in choosing the companies they do business with.
The exploratory urge just keeps on evolving, changing, expanding. That is one trend I can confidently predict will continue to increase in force. The incessant human urge to travel, roam and explore will never be extinguished. That I am sure of.
Your humble reporter,
Colin Treadwell
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