Youth travel is a fast growing market within the industry of tourism. According to Deborah Fitzgerald, of the WYSE Travel Confederation:
“The global youth travel industry is now estimated to represent almost 190 million international trips a year, and the youth travel industry has grown faster than global travel overall. By 2020 there will be almost 300 million international youth trips per year, according to UNWTO forecasts.”
35% of British people went on holiday to foreign destinations and we were the “5th biggest spender on holidays” according to Agnieszka Czarkowska from Surveybee.
Travelling is a stimulation for young people. It encourages people to educate themselves by learning a new language, discovering a new culture, meeting new friends and of course taking a break from home. Young Brits in the UK work very hard due to high competition for jobs, making the most of a recovering economy that is still very fragile and the growing businesses and markets in multiculturalism.
The prospect of taking holidays abroad was considered a luxury because back then everything was very expensive. But thanks to the rise of tourism and the European Union, travelling has become very cheap due to affordable airlines like Ryanair, Wizz and EasyJet, the inter-railing trains and backpacking. Young travellers are able to use these benefits to travel to more countries and places in Europe and also internationally to places such as the USA and Asia.
In terms of the top destination for Brits to travel, according to statistics in 2015, 4.8% of Brits went to Mallorca, 3.2% to Ibiza and 1.6% to Disneyland Paris. In total around 3.5m million Brits went travelling in 2015. In terms of the top 10 countries Spain, France, Greece, USA, the UK, Italy, Croatia, Thailand, Turkey and Egypt are the countries most British travellers go to visit.
Why does travelling help your motivation?
For many of us young Brits, we still find Europe a very strange and big place far away from the shores of the UK. As an island nation, we are separated by at least 25 miles from Dover to Calais in France and we regard ourselves different to everyone else. Since I have been living in the UK for more than 5 years, I have met lots of young people who are from small villages, towns and cities and the world they know is a very small radius. There are some who love the idea of travelling and there are others who find it very daunting. Everybody is different.
Travelling is an important tool for motivation because it broadens your thoughts, it gives you confidence, helps maturity and makes you into a responsible person. It opens new and meaningful relationships that might last a lifetime. It gives you the ambition to do what you want to do. It gives you inspiration to learn a new language or a new culture. It allows you to have breathing space from the environment you usually live and work in and provides time for yourself. It definitely helps you to be more assertive on decisions instead of being dependent on your family and friends.
Airtreks says it gives you perspective and that…
“Meeting people from exotic cultures will teach you that the way you’ve been looking at the world isn’t the way everybody else does. In fact, you might be dead wrong about it. Seeing it for yourself brings a healthy dose of reality check.”
But there are some people who say ‘What is the point in travelling?’ and ‘Why bother doing it if you got everything you need and have here in the UK?” And finally some feel that they don’t know what to do and what to expect from visiting another country.
When someone decides to take the big leap and visit a foreign country outside their own comfort zones, they are forever changed afterwards. Depending how long you visit another country, the first thing you realise is that the language is different. Whether you are in a place where the people speak French, Spanish, Italian or German it becomes a communication challenge. The good thing for those who don’t speak a language other than English is that the majority of European states speak good English, since English is the most common spoken language in the world.
Then the next obstacle is the physical environment, things like the buildings, transports, shops and food which will definitely be different than what you are used to in Cardiff. In a situation like that, the only answer is you will have to adapt to it otherwise there is no point of you travelling if you can’t do it.
Travelling is a chance to improve decision making, confidence, initiative and social skills because you will be put in situations where you will have to break these barriers and it will give you the greatest of joys. It gives you skills that you don’t realise you had and it does overall make into a better person.
When you return from your adventure and have been to extraordinary places, you will return to your job, school, university and old friends as if everything is back to normal. But the person changes forever afterwards and you will look on life in a different way from then on.
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