Timeline of Travel

The first long-distance trade routes. Lapis lazuli from Badakhshan in Afghanistan reaches Egypt and Mesopotamia, carried along relay networks thousands of kilometres long. Nobody makes the whole journey; goods pass between traders. It is the earliest evidence of sustained long-distance movement, and it is entirely commercial.

Egyptians visit their own antiquities. Graffiti left by New Kingdom Egyptian officials at the Step Pyramid at Saqqara records that they came to see the monuments of an earlier age. The pyramids were already a thousand years old and were already being visited for their own sake.

The Olympic Games begin. Athletes and spectators travel from across the Greek world to Olympia every four years, under a sacred truce guaranteeing safe passage. It is the first recurring event that moves large numbers of people across political boundaries for a non-religious, non-commercial reason.

Herodotus writes the first travel account. The Greek historian travels through Egypt, the Black Sea, Mesopotamia and North Africa and writes down what he sees, hears and is told. Much of it is wrong. It is nonetheless the first surviving attempt to describe foreign places for readers who will not go.

The Silk Roads open. Han dynasty envoys establish contact westward and a network of overland routes begins moving silk, horses, ideas, religions and disease between China, Central Asia, Persia and eventually Rome. It operates for well over a thousand years.

Roman roads make travel routine. The Roman road network reaches around 80,000km of paved highway with milestones, staging posts and inns. For the first time a private citizen can travel from Britain to Syria on a predictable schedule, and wealthy Romans begin taking holidays at Baiae on the Bay of Naples.

Pausanias writes a guidebook. The Greek geographer produces the Description of Greece — ten volumes of routes, distances, monuments and what to look at when you get there. It is recognisably a guidebook, and archaeologists still use it to locate sites.

Helena travels to the Holy Land. The mother of Constantine makes a well-documented journey to Jerusalem and identifies sites associated with the life of Christ. Christian pilgrimage becomes a mass movement within a century, and the infrastructure built for it is the first travel industry.

Xuanzang walks to India. The Chinese Buddhist monk leaves Chang’an against imperial orders and travels overland to India, returning after sixteen years with hundreds of texts. His account remains a primary source for the history of Central Asia and India.

The Hajj becomes an annual mass journey. The pilgrimage to Mecca is formalised as an obligation for those able to make it. It has moved more people over more centuries than any other single journey in human history and continues to do so.

The pilgrim roads to Santiago take shape. Routes across France and northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela develop hospices, waymarking and a badge trade. A twelfth-century manuscript, the Codex Calixtinus, includes a route description that functions as a guidebook, complete with warnings about which rivers are poisonous.

Marco Polo leaves Venice. The seventeen-year-old departs with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan, returning after twenty-four years. His account, dictated in a Genoese prison, is the most influential travel book in European history and was widely disbelieved.

Ibn Battuta sets out. The twenty-one-year-old Moroccan leaves Tangier for the Hajj and does not return for twenty-four years, covering perhaps 120,000km across Africa, Arabia, India, Central Asia, China and Iberia. His Rihla is the most extensive travel account of the medieval world.

Zheng He’s treasure fleets sail. The Ming admiral commands seven expeditions across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and East Africa with fleets of over 300 ships. China abandons the voyages after 1433 and turns inward, decades before the European expansion begins.

Columbus reaches the Caribbean. Sailing west for Asia, Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas. What follows is the Columbian exchange of crops, animals and diseases, and the conquest and depopulation of the Americas — the single largest demographic catastrophe in recorded history.

Vasco da Gama reaches India by sea. The Portuguese route around the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut breaks the overland monopoly on the spice trade and begins four centuries of European maritime empire in the Indian Ocean.

The first circumnavigation begins. Magellan’s expedition leaves Spain with five ships and 270 men. One ship and eighteen men return three years later under Elcano; Magellan is killed in the Philippines. It establishes the size of the Pacific and therefore of the planet.

Cook’s first Pacific voyage. James Cook sails to observe the transit of Venus and charts New Zealand and the east coast of Australia. The three voyages map much of the Pacific and open it to European settlement, with consequences for its peoples that are still being reckoned with.

The Grand Tour begins. Wealthy young northern Europeans start spending one to four years travelling to France and Italy, ostensibly for education. It creates the first genuine tourist economy: guides, souvenir painters, maintained ruins and a market for the view as a commodity.

The spa town is invented. Bath’s rebuilding under Beau Nash turns taking the waters into a social season. Spa towns across Europe — Baden-Baden, Karlovy Vary, Spa itself — follow the model, and medical prescription becomes the respectable justification for leisure travel.

Sea bathing is prescribed. English doctors begin recommending immersion in cold seawater. Scarborough, Brighton and Weymouth develop as resorts on the strength of a medical fashion, and the seaside holiday is invented as a treatment.

Mont Blanc is climbed. Paccard and Balmat reach the summit, and alpinism begins as a pursuit. Within eighty years the Alps have a tourist industry, mountain guides as a profession, and the first purpose-built hotels above the snow line.

The first passenger railway opens. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway begins scheduled passenger service. Within twenty years railway networks across Europe and North America make it possible to move large numbers of ordinary people cheaply, which is the precondition for everything that follows.

Murray publishes the first modern guidebook. John Murray III’s Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent gives routes, distances, currencies, prices and blunt assessments of inns. Karl Baedeker follows in Koblenz, and between them they invent the form — including the star rating, which standardises what people go to see.

Thomas Cook’s first excursion. Cook charters a train to take 500 temperance campaigners eleven miles from Leicester to Loughborough for a shilling. Within thirty years he is running conducted tours to Egypt, having invented the hotel coupon and the pre-paid itinerary.

Castle Garden opens in New York. The first official immigrant receiving station in the United States processes about eight million people over 35 years, before Ellis Island replaces it. Mass emigration is the largest movement of people of the century and is not tourism, but it builds the shipping routes tourism later uses.

The Suez Canal opens. The canal cuts the sea route from Europe to Asia by thousands of miles. In the same year the first American transcontinental railroad is completed and Cook runs his first Nile cruise. Long-distance travel becomes a schedule rather than an expedition.

The Kodak camera goes on sale. A hundred-exposure roll-film camera sold with the slogan ‘you press the button, we do the rest’. Photography stops being a specialist activity and the holiday photograph is born, along with the idea of travelling in order to bring back images.

The Michelin Guide is given away free. A tyre company publishes a guide to French hotels and restaurants for motorists, with the entirely commercial aim of encouraging them to drive further and wear out more tyres. The star system follows in 1926.

The Wright brothers fly. Twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk. Within fifty years scheduled jet services cross oceans, and within seventy the cost per seat collapses to the point where a factory worker in northern Europe can spend a fortnight on the Mediterranean.

The flying boat era. Imperial Airways and Pan Am operate long-distance routes by flying boat, taking days and stopping nightly at hotels. Travel by air is extraordinarily expensive, extraordinarily glamorous, and available to almost nobody.

France legislates paid holidays. The Popular Front introduces two weeks of paid annual leave. The following summer the railways carry an unprecedented number of working-class families to the coast. Britain follows in 1938; the United States never passes a federal equivalent.

Twenty-five million international arrivals. The first year for which reasonably reliable global figures exist. Within seventy-five years the annual total passes a billion — an increase of roughly forty times, against a world population increase of about three.

Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. Arthur Frommer’s guide assumes a reader who will arrange their own trip on a modest budget. It sells in enormous numbers and helps create independent budget travel as a category distinct from the package tour.

The Boeing 707 enters service. Transatlantic jet service begins. Journey times halve and the cost per seat begins a fall that does not stop. The 747 follows in 1970 and collapses it further.

The package holiday transforms the Mediterranean. Charter flight, transfer, hotel and food sold as a single product put Spain, Greece and later Turkey and Tunisia within reach of northern European workers. Those coastlines are transformed economically and physically within about fifteen years.

The hippie trail opens. Overland routes from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal carry a generation of young travellers by bus and hitchhiking. It closes after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s.

Lonely Planet publishes its first book. Tony and Maureen Wheeler staple together an account of crossing Asia overland and sell it from a kitchen table. The series that follows creates the modern backpacker circuit, largely because it lists towns in a particular order.

Airline deregulation begins. The US Airline Deregulation Act removes government control of routes and fares, and the EU follows through the 1990s. The low-cost carrier model that results makes a weekend in another country cost less than a night out at home.

The first World Heritage tourism boom. UNESCO’s list, begun in 1978, starts measurably driving visitor numbers to inscribed sites. Designation protects places and brings the crowds that endanger them, a tension the organisation has never resolved.

The Berlin Wall falls. Eastern Europe opens to travel within months. Prague, Budapest, Krakow and later the Baltic states and the Balkans move from inaccessible to weekend-break destinations inside a decade.

The internet reaches travel booking. The first online travel agencies appear, and within a decade they have displaced most high-street booking. Direct comparison of fares and independent reviews restructure the industry and shift power from operators to travellers, and then to platforms.

September 11th changes air travel permanently. Security screening, watchlists and the modern airport experience follow. International arrivals fall for the first time in decades and recover within three years, which becomes the pattern for every subsequent shock.

Short-term letting platforms launch. Airbnb is founded in 2008 and within a decade has restructured urban accommodation, brought income to homeowners, and become a central factor in housing-cost disputes in a long list of cities.

Overtourism enters the vocabulary. The word is coined and immediately used everywhere. Venice, Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam and Kyoto all begin introducing measures to limit or manage visitor numbers. Venice’s resident population has by now fallen by roughly two-thirds since 1950.

International travel stops. Covid-19 closes borders worldwide. International arrivals fall by around 70 per cent in a year — the largest collapse ever recorded — and destinations dependent on tourism lose most of their income overnight. Recovery to pre-pandemic volumes takes about four years.

Venice charges for entry. The first city in the world to charge day visitors an access fee. Barcelona announces it will eliminate short-term tourist lets entirely by 2028. Managing volume, rather than asking visitors to behave better, becomes the mainstream policy response.