Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
After 20 years of advancing blindness, I suddenly felt liberated enough by a white cane to take off again, and headed by myself for 7 ex-Soviet republics. I intended to do it the 90s way, but the last day I bought a $50 tablet and learned to use it, but no phone.
I still did quite a lot of word of mouth dead reckoning, but I did change my itinerary and book a few rooms on line. Compared to paper, online maps are unsatisfactory.
Later, on a trip to Surinam/Guyana, my tablet crashed in Trinidad the first day, so I was without any connections for two weeks. It was OK, I don't think I missed much. In Ethiopia and Somalia, wifi is effectively down for days at a time, with only a sporadic few slow minutes.
Back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s you had a much better chance of coming home with a funny travel story, usually due to either miscommunication (no cell phones) or bad restaurant or entertainment choices (no TripAdvisor).
A few more things: my mother flew from Cincinnati *where my Dad attended college) to Canton-Akron Airport where the family lived when she was 8 months pregnant because the doc said she shouldn't do a road trip in her delicate condition. Now they'd never let her on the plane.
And there were no loyalty programs. AA was the first, in 1981. No credit card rebates, either. The first plans were primitive. You fly X trips, you get a free one. So, you could fly between Newark and Washington National X times and then fly free to LAX. Those were the days.
Dad traveled on business in the 1960s. He said that it was so expensive then it was nearly all businessmen with the occasional military wife. He had a credit card (APA for Airline Passenger's Association?) specifically for airline travel that he could use any time, in the US or internationally, to book a flight at the last minute. His company paid the bill.
I took a trip to Europe in 1980. I had a hotel reservation in Brussels that the travel agent set up and a Eurailpass. I'd decide where I wanted to go, then call the European equivalent of an 800 number for the major chains till I found a hotel that had a room available in that city. I was, and still am, a bit of a control freak about having the flight and room reservations in place before I went anywhere.
The hotel concierge was your friend. He or she would recommend restaurants, tell you when the museums were open, etc. They probably got kickbacks. I remember one claiming total ignorance of a nearby restaurant I'd found on the internet- we went there anyway and it was just fine.
And there were no loyalty programs. AA was the first, in 1981.
Actually, I thought AA was second, Texas International Airlines had one starting back in 1979, of course that airline no longer exists, it merged with Continental back in 1982.
Travel guide books were a big deal, as were travel magazines and the travel sections of major newspapers. All over the world, the travel sections of Sunday papers (or their equivalent) were packed with ads from travel agencies offering cheap flights and tours. You just used your phone instead of your computer.
Trying to rent a beach house was hit or miss without photos!
Yes! I don't know how my dad ever found our vacation cottage at the Cape. Probably from either word of mouth or someone who had been to the Cape gave him a newspaper with ads for cottages. After the first time we already rented that very same cottage every year. There was no way of knowing about other ones unless you happened to drive past them or someone told you--or maybe you investigated an ad in the paper.
It was almost impossible to find out anything about certain areas in advance. You learned a lot from people and you depended upon people.
In Corpus Christi during the 70's, we had family and friends who went to Sanibel Island for a cheap summer vacation every year, so we started renting a beach house there, a time-share it would now be called. Boy, did we get sunburned. The idea of going to Florida in the summer sounds pretty stupid, now.
At the airport -- we drove to Florida, of course, in our chrome-encrusted Pontiac Catalina -- they would roll up a metal staircase to the door of the Boeing 727 and you would enter through that, even when it was raining.
In 1970 on my trip to Europe where we mostly camped, hubby and I did take a side trip on our own by car to Amsterdam and then across the English channel by ferry. That's where internet would have made a huge difference.
When we got to Amsterdam, we had no idea that the main square would be crammed full of people smoking dope and sleeping in the street. I had never seen anything like that before, hippies lying and sitting all over the place. We didn't know how crowded it would be and that there was no place to stay. But I wanted to stay there because the Anne Frank house was nearby.
Not wanting to sleep on the ground, we knocked on the door of a place that had rooms to rent. But the owner said even though he had a room, we wouldn't want it. We took it anyway. He was right. Being next to one of the canals, it was probably below sea level and was extremely dank and smelly. Everything felt wet. I had hardly any sleep and even when I washed up, I still felt dirty and sweaty. With the internet, we would have known in advance.
I was just thinking about domestic traveling with our young children, in the years just before the internet became a "thing". Bookings for air travel was something we had the travel agent do. You would make the arrangements by calling the agency on your land line phone, then show up and pay for the tickets in person, walking away with multi-page "booklets" that were your tickets. Hotels provided printed national guidebooks with locations by state, including direct phone lines to the individual properties and printed rates. We stuck to chains like Motel 6 or Super 8, and would stop at a local property to grab the latest yearly guide to plan our trip. Information on states or hot travel destinations was found in places like the "domestic travel section" of your local Barnes and Noble or Borders book store. If you belonged to AAA, you could also get state by state guides that listed all the tourism locations of interest, and rated dining and lodging in all noteworthy locations. AAA would also provide "Trip-tics" which the average teen of today would find hilarious. It was basically Flintstone era GPS. They would print and bind these odd flip charts that would cover your route, like a manual GPS. If you did a coast to coast trip, you would end up with a pile of these silly things, and the travel agent would take the time to trace your route with a highlighter. They weren't useless, but useless adjacent. Finally, as a business owner, without a cell phone, I had to stay in contact back at home. I would buy "phone cards" which allowed the ability to turn a $3-4 pay phone call back home into a $0.15 call, by using the phone card debit card and calling a #800 number, with your PIN # to make a call home from a roadside pay phone. This was to call the answering machine in the kitchen, which almost never had useless junk messages left on it, just serious info. from folks who knew that it might take a day or two until you returned their call.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
