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The headline is a bit of a lie—travel is changing undoubtedly.
Thank you for intercepting this dispatch, the first of several arriving from Uzbekistan, the very heart of the Silk Road. But before all that, I simply have to talk about something I saw as a bit of a seachange.
For a few years I’ve gradually got the feeling like traveling has changed. When I was a kid, it was as simple as buying a plane ticket to a place, and showing up smiling for a stamp in your passport. Folks older than I share that it was even more liberal than this, that crossing a land border was as simple as waving amicably at one ambivalent border guard after another. I remember when selecting seats was done without charge, and everyone got a checked bag.
In Turkiye, I landed in Izmir en route to Samarkand, just 6 hours after receiving a $20 tourist visa 4 days late from the Uzbek foreign office 3 hours before my flight departed Malpensa airport. It was not the first time in the post-COVID era that I had failed to comfortably secure a tourist visa in advance of my departure somewhere, and a real embarrassment.
However, whilst recovering my boarding pass for Uzbekistan, the Turkish gentleman behind the counter said the airport check-in fee is €5. “Five euro?” I thought, “A tourist visa fee, a fee to check-in?” I suddenly remembered the tourist process to visit India: a fee, a processing time, and then full biometric documentation of me upon my arrival in New Delhi, including all five fingers, then each finger individually, on both hands, plus photos from the front and side.
A very TSA chill ran down my spine as I walked over to hand a payment receipt to the Izmir check-in counter. After that brief wrinkle, everything became normal travel (the exception being live music in an airport bar). But I had been shaken by the idea of a check-in fee. The man said if I had checked in online, there would be no fee. Feels very self-checkout counter to me—offloading a job onto the consumer.
But fair enough, companies can make their policies as they like. I personally like to check-in at the counter. I’ve been saved more than once by a check-in counter employee updating me on flight status, or alerting the gate that I was, in fact, at the airport and moving as fast as possible to make the flight. But if that costs me $5 every time, it may go the way of the stewardess. Once onboard, it was a fairly short flight for Asia, but still four-and-a-half hours long. I could understand a lack of meal, especially considering the lateness of the hour, but the inflight service was purchase only, including water—of which one bottle was approximately enough to water a bonzai tree for a day.
As I have reported before, we are living in an age of mass tourism that’s amassing mass. I detect somewhere in my bones that travel is becoming more and more impersonal. I’m not pining for the days when Lufthansa’s dinners included ham sliced tray table-side and draft beer from a wooden keg poured into a stein made of glass, I just see the airline and travel industry more broadly moving towards the classic trade off of mass-production: endless and effortless reproduction and replication creating a big screen of facelessness and namelessness.
There’s more demand and supply than ever, sending all those little gestures of airline travel we remember from our youth down without a parachute. Hotels don’t have guestbooks anymore and I can’t remember the last time one fulfilled my request of organizing train travel in country for me.
I spoke once to a man who had traveled to every country on Earth plus UN observer states without flying and without returning home in between. He doubted such a thing would be possible in the near future, as land border crossings are becoming difficult. States are consolidating their power by creating more entry and exit restrictions and enforcing them more stringently. E-visas, rather than visas on arrival, are becoming the dominant form of authorization. Travelers have all become tourists, and are now suspects and burdens rather than guests.
There will come a time when the meal and beverage service on flights across the Atlantic will be monetized, and then all bets are off. The last vestiges of the old aviation traditions will be scrapped for everyone not flying either business class or Qatar/Emirates Airways. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Economy Class on Pan Am, 1961
