I must admit: I love to travel. My reasons: I like to see new places, meet people, learn the history of the place, eat foods which aren’t Filipino, and take photos. All these can be done when you travel.
As Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
So many famous people love to travel, too. Robert Louis Stevenson, in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, penned: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
In Emerson’s Essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” Here’s what Roman Payne said in Rooftop Soliloquy: “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.”
“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away,” wrote Pascal Mercier in Night Train to Lisbon. “And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Fellowship of the Ring, gives an interesting observation on those who travel: “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.”
Travel is fun and exciting. But you cannot have it all. There are always two sides of a coin. That other side is no fun at all. Recently, I posed this question in my social media: “What things don't you like about traveling?”
Of the 17 people who responded, three mentioned having a seatmate who has an armpit, body arm odor and smelly feet. “I really hate those people who haven’t heard of body deodorant,” one quipped.
Three people also singled out the long queue at the immigration. “Long line at the immigration and delayed flight,” explained one lady. Another one also hated delayed flights and cancelled flights.”
One guy made a list: security guards and immigration officers, other travelers who don’t care about other fellow travelers, travelers who bring in their hand-carry bags those items which are prohibited to be carried on, and wrecked luggage.
A former neighbor, who now lives in United Kingdom, also shared her list of dislikes: outwitting each other at the queue (“as if di makasakay, eh lahat naman may upuan”), noisy people who don’t stop talking, those reclining their seat as soon as they get in, and children or adults who kick your seat from behind.
Now, there are just a few of the things which travelers have to face when they go from one place to another. Just recently, I got the result of a global survey conducted by Singapore-based Agoda, one of the fastest growing online travel agents. “Thanks to good deals, more people are now travelling the world, but with that comes irritations that can take the fun out of the whole experience,” the press statement said.
So, what do you think are the most annoying habits travelers see on their journeys? “Noisy travelers (57%), travelers glued to their devices (47%), and those insensitive to cultural nuances (46%) topped the most annoying habits of fellow travelers according to Agoda’s global ‘Annoying Travel Habits’ survey. Mass tour groups and selfie-takers, cited by 36% and 21% respectively, complete the top five irritants,” the press statement disclosed.
Among Filipinos, what annoys them the most? The top three annoying travel habits for Filipinos, according to the Agoda survey, are as follows: insensitivity to cultural nuances (61%), noisy travelers (59%), and people glued to their devices and not paying attention to where they are going (52%).
Here’s the rest of the press statement:
“Chinese travelers seemingly have the highest tolerance for selfie-takers, with only 12% of Chinese respondents are irritated by selfie-takers compared to Australians who are on the other end of the tolerance spectrum with nearly a third (31%) citing holiday selfie-takers as annoying.
“Insensitivity to local culture nuances is more than twice as irritating for Singaporeans, (63%) Filipinos (61%) and Malaysians (60%) than it is for the Chinese (21%) and Thai (27%) travelers. About half of British (54%) and two-fifths of American travelers (41%) are intolerant of this habit.
“Almost half (47%) of the global respondents cited travelers spending too much time on their mobile devices as a grievance. Compared to travelers from other countries, the Vietnamese find those glued to their devices the most annoying (59%). Thai travelers, on the other hand, have the most relaxed attitude (31%) towards constant device usage on holiday.
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, solo travelers spend nearly two hours a day on their devices when on holiday (117 minutes) – which is 15% more time than when they are traveling with friends (100 minutes) and 26% more time than if they are with family (86 minutes).
“Americans are the only exception to this trend and on average spend less time on their devices when traveling solo (62 minutes) than when they are with family (66 minutes) or friends (86 minutes).
“Brits are the most engaged travelers when traveling together, limiting their screen time to just over an hour (63 minutes) a day. Comparatively Thai travelers spend more than two hours a day (125 minutes) on the phone when they travel with friends or family.”
