The notion of the holiday isn’t something that’s all that new. In Victorian times people began to enjoy the freedom offered by train rides and took to visiting areas of the country just for leisure, leading to a lot of disapproval from the upper class that saw this as spoiling their landscape (by allowing everyone to enjoy the same freedom they had). Even hundreds of years back Oxford and Cambridge would close over the summer to allow students respite, and also to help them avoid the peak season of the plague.
Fifty years ago, in England at least, people enjoyed holidays as a routine part of their year. This differed in some ways from previous generations, as travel was easier due to cars being more affordable, and motorways being introduced. The caravan also meant that people could stay in a new place for cheap. The trend was towards camping in rural locations within easy reach of attractions and landmarks. AA guidebooks gave beautifully detailed descriptions of places of historical and cultural interest even in the most out of the way parts of Great Britain.
Airfares were reducing in price throughout this time, and by the seventies people from all kinds of backgrounds could afford to get away to places that were once too far for a short break. Spain opened its doors, and it’s blocks of seaside accommodation, to a new wave of tourists that wanted sun and sand well away from their own shores. This airplane craze also led to a decline in people travelling by boat, which has continued to reduce to the present day.
Through the eighties and nineties the trend continued, only with more and more choice of location. In fact during the late nineties, thanks to there being less tax on flying and a strong pound it was probably easier, and certainly cheaper, to get away to far flung locations than it is in some ways now. However, what’s really changed the way we do holidays at the moment is the internet.
Having such a vast amount of information to select from, and businesses from even remote locations making use of interfacing on the web, it’s now much easier and less stressful to find a good price for an exotic holiday, or a really good price for a hop across to Europe. So it isn’t just air travel that’s made the world smaller.