Skift Take
Nobody would argue that the European Union is a perfect institution but not only has it helped foster a degree of unity between former enemies but it has also ushered in an era of unparalleled freedom for its citizens. Brexit has put all that under threat.
One week before the UK Prime Minister triggers her country's departure from the European Union, and less than two weeks before our inaugural Skift Forum Europe, we're launching a series of four stories devoted to Resetting Transatlantic Travel.
One of our 2017 Megatrends called this year one of reckoning for European tourism. With the departure of the UK from the EU, the growth of low-cost carriers like Norwegian Air, multiple violent acts in major European cities, and the rise of neo-isolationism in the United States and European countries, it's indeed a year of large-scale shifts for the most popular region in the world for tourism.
Our first story looks at how the freedom of movement brought about by the EU radically changed how we think about borders, money, and transportation, and has defined how the current generation of travelers thinks about the essential building blocks of travel.
When travel agent Bonnie Salt was selling vacations to Europe in the 1980s and '90s things were very different to how they are now.
Each country still had its own visa system and there was also the issue of dealing with multiple currencies.
“It took a long time to do a booking and you had to make sure of course because of the liabilities that you documented everything. And so we would use these huge reservation envelopes and you’d write notes, and you’d write notes on the front, and then you’d write notes on these peoples’ itineraries,” she said
“We literally had a secretary in those days and we would dictate with a Dictaphone what we needed on the itinerary. And you’d have to put all of that on it because if you didn’t you’d get these calls from foreign countries saying ‘why didn’t you tell me about this?’”
It wasn’t as if this put people off going to Europe — in 1989 it welcomed 266 million people, 62 percent of the world’s total tourists — it was just that it made travel more complicated. If you wanted to visit say France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands you’d need to manage four lots of currency and go through multiple border checks.
“People would hand me over their old change from whatever country they were in and I ended up with this huge pile of these old currencies sitting in my desk,” Salt remembers.
Anybody who has travelled within Europe over the last decade or so knows that things have changed.
The project of integrating the continent, firstly through a common economic interes
