In 1983, my wife and I backpacked around Europe for a few months before I started a secondment to a bank in London. Forty years later, we are travelling in France and Spain before heading to a family wedding in Germany.
Of course, we have been to Europe many times over those decades, but when we realised it was 40 years to the month since our first trip, we started reflecting on the changes not only in Europe and travel, but in ourselves. The starry-eyed 25-year-olds are now more worldly-wise 65-year-olds, making it impossible to say which experience was ‘better’.
But let’s look at how the trips were different, good and bad. Here's the 2023 map taken from my wife's Polarsteps blog, with a combination of plane, train and automobile travel.
1. (Almost) everything now booked in advance
For many years, every long trip has involved a spreadsheet: dates, transport, hotel, activities, all planned by the day and booked on the internet after much research. Every hotel stay involves numerous checks of booking sites and directly with the hotel to find the best price and room, ensuring the location works for transport and activities.
In 1983, without the internet and mobile phones, we knew a start and end date and a rough direction, but not much else, except something wonderful. The Eurail Youth Pass offered two months of unlimited train and boat travel for a few hundred dollars. It was a ticket to freedom, allowing decisions to be made every day according to whim.
Accommodation was not so easy. Arrive in a new city, armed with ‘Europe on $20 a Day’, and search around the train station for a ‘pension’ or hostel or affordable hotel. If especially lucky in more trusting times, an old lady (who was probably the age we are now!) would approach two clean-looking Australians and offer a room in her house. These turned into some of our best stays, in splendid residences where the owners needed money for living and upkeep.
But many times, the finding of a room after a long train journey was a slog, and without review services such as TripAdvisor, always a gamble. While today’s review services are inconsistent, there’s less chance of a dud.
Which is better? Hands down, knowing exactly where the good hotel is and already booked. It's not a time for spontaneity. A prior check on Google Street View shows where to walk as we step out of the train station, and into a quality room quickly.
2. The single currency
The euro was launched on 1 January 1999 and the change to common coins and bank notes took three years to 2002. It is a welcome improvement in European travel convenience, and no doubt was one of the driving forces behind the expected efficiency of one currency across many major countries in the European Union (but not all).
In 1983, changing currency in every country, and then making sure not too much was leftover before leaving, was a logistical exercise. The most common way to carry currency was travellers’ cheques, and with the nascent adoption of credit cards, nearly all payments were in cash. The late 1980s was a boom period for adoption of travel loyalty cards, but The Platinum Card was not introduced by American Express until 1984.
So a big plus now is using one currency in all major mainland Europe countries. A few hundred euros was all the cash needed for a month of travel, and in Spain and France especially, even small purchases of a few euro were done by phone.
3. Minimising the exchange rate cost
While carrying a physical credit card is useful, it usually stays in the pocket, as nearly all payments are made by a swipe of a mobile phone. Here is a valuable improvement in technology, but it’s not only the convenience of everything, including a great camera, on the mobile phone.
One of the last bastions of little competition, especially among the banks and financial institutions who are the major issuers of credit and travel cards, is retail foreign exchange. The ‘no commissions’ claim is meaningless, especially at bureaus de change, as the spread between the wholesale rates and retail rates is at least 3%, and usually more at the bureaus in airports and popular tourist spots. If travelling business class, staying in good hotels and eating well, 3% could add $1,000 or more on a $30,000 trip.
Our go-to payment method was the Wise Visa card with euros stored on the account in advance (there is no commercial arrangement here, and no doubt there are competitors with similar offers, and any reader is welcome to add a comment to this article about any genuinely good product).
The Wise card offers wholesale exchange rates with a transaction fee of only 0.46%. For example, if A$1,000 is converted to euros using the Wise app when the wholesale exchange rate is 0.6, €600 is received less a fee of $4.60. This compares with say 3% or $30 with most banks, and worse at ATMs. On arrival in Paris, we needed some cash, and the exchange rate was 0.54 plus a €3 fee. Although we changed only a small amount, paying an extra 6% to travel around should be avoided. We topped up the Wise card as needed with quick transfers between our Australian bank account and Wise, but we did not use a physical card.
(Since writing this, I note reviews saying other experiences with Wise have not been good so buyer beware. I did not need to use their customer service nor a physical card).
4. Communication
In 1983, we queued at Amex offices to collect letters from home. We waited in line at post offices to make expensive reverse charge phone calls lasting only a few minutes. We wrote ‘aerogrammes’ regularly as the only way to stay in touch, and those documents now record precious memories.
These days, it’s all mobile phones, and Wi-Fi is good in hotels and most eating places. One downside of the heavy reliance on the phone is the agony if it is lost. I took my previous phone as a backup but I’m old enough to need a printed copy of all bookings for reassurance. I’m also in the uncomfortable habit of checking where my phone is a hundred times a day. I use the PPWW system to check I have the essentials with me – Phone, Passport, Wallet, Wife (oops, wrong order).
But what about mobile access without Wi-Fi? Our mobile provider is Telstra in Australia, and their global roaming cost is $10 a day with 1GB data. For both of us, that would cost $600 for a month.
In previous years, the solution was to buy a sim card on arrival in a city, but that involved finding the right store, changing the sim card and hoping it all worked with a new phone number.
The advent of the e-sim allows access to cheaper services loaded before leaving Australia. We used Airalo which offers a Europe regional e-sim covering 39 countries. Connection to the e-sim is downloaded directly to the phone via their app, activated on arrival in Europe. The cost for 30 days and 3GB is US$13 or 5GB for US$20. Larger downloads can be done on Wi-Fi in hotels and top up is easy if more data is required. Airalo is nominated on the phone as the ‘primary’ provider and moves the usual ISP to ‘secondary’. It proved a reliable and cheap way to retain internet, maps, and WhatsApp access at all times.
Another great development is Google Translate to read signs or menus by choosing the camera option to give an English translation. No more wondering about the vast choices on the long menu.
5. Rental cars
Renting cars has become more complicated, and not only because the range of cars is almost infinite with many more companies. I’m reminded of the work of Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice. Annoyingly, selecting a particular car is almost impossible as every company can supply a ‘comparable car’.
The good side is that Europe offers a wonderful motorway system, and long distances favour diesel cars, which frequently give a range of 1,000 kilometres or more as they sip fuel in top gear. It’s easy to average 120km/hour even for Australians not as familiar with fast driving as Europeans, who fly past at speeds approaching 200km/hour. A daunting 500 kilometres journey can be completed in four to five hours without breaking the speed rules.
(Rental car companies know how much fuel expenses can be saved on diesel and offer a ‘diesel guarantee’ for an extra charge when booking a car).
But tolls are everywhere and expensive. One toll in Spain after a good drive on a motorway was €27, or almost $50. Keep a physical credit card handy as waving an expensive iPhone out of the car window is an accident waiting to happen.
A major complication involves the level of insurance with the rental car company. My usual credit card provides travel insurance including coverage for rental cars, and I rely on that, but some people just want to hand back the car and not bother about the consequences of any damage, so they take out full insurances with the rental company. Fine, but it’s a big cost and the rental car company always gives the hard sell on “We’ll charge you the excess and you’ll need to fight it out with your own insurer” so it’s my guess they make heaps out of the insurance.
For example, to reduce the $1,500 excess to zero costs $65 a day, and there are all types of other choices, such as ‘Windscreen, glass, lights and tyres’ at $28 a day, ‘personal accident’ at $41 a day, roadside assistance at $39 a day, cross-border fee of $31, additional driver fee of $41, even a navigation cost of $43 a day when everyone has maps on their phone. We connected to the car’s Apple CarPlay for no cost. If any domestic insurer can find a way to extend normal Australian car insurance to an overseas trip, it would be a great product.
6. Comfort and convenience
The big difference between the youths of 1983 and the journeyed of 2023 is the ability and willingness to pay for comfort. Travel involves a fair amount of effort and inconvenience and is likely to become less appealing as the years roll by, so take a chunk out of the kids’ inheritance and do it with a bit of style, if it’s affordable.
We all have different thresholds in the many facets of travel. For me, good accommodation in great locations is worth paying for, and I appreciated the room overlooking the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Paradores hotel built inside an ancient castle on the water at Hondaribbia near San Sebastian, and the East Side accommodation facing the Spree River and the Berlin Wall, decorated by artists in the longest gallery in the world. Memories worth paying for. And I’m not schlepping at the back of a plane for 24 hours, hoping to arrive in one piece.
But I don’t need to be picked up by a limo, I don’t need to eat under Michelin stars every night (although the $1,000 lunch at three-star Arzak was a worthwhile special event), I’m fine with Hop-On-Hop-Off tours rather than a personal guide, and public transport can be a great way to see a city. Assembling a dinner of cheeses, meats, bread and wine to eat by a river is every bit as good now as 40 years ago.
In 1983, we stayed in youth hostels for a few dollars, sometimes 12 people to a room, we walked a lot, and rooms in pensions were inexpensive with shared facilities. We often chose the cheapest form of transport. Comfort didn’t matter so much at the time but it sure as hell does now.
And crucially, we slowed the pace this time. In 1983, we packed the days and nights and moved on. In 2023, we spent longer in one place, with more down time and even a snooze in the afternoon. It can be difficult to give yourself permission for a day off when you’re in a major European city with much to see, but we relaxed into it better.
7. The economy
Staying in the booming cities of Barcelona or Bilbao or Hamburg or Berlin or Paris or Cologne in the height of summer is no guide to how the European economy is faring overall. Inflation has hit Australian prices but Europe feels more expensive than ever. Joining the queues to spend heaps of euros makes it look as if Europe is thriving and must be a great place to invest, although it barely rates in the portfolios of most Australians.
The vibrant activity in the big cities is misleading as Europe overall is not doing well economically. The Wall Street Journal of 17 June 2023 ran the following headline, and the article discusses economic stagflation, poor demographics due to an ageing population, little urge for innovation and technology, insufficient migration and a population that values free time over long work hours. As the recent elections in Spain confirm, in addition to results in Italy and Germany, politics is becoming hostage to extremes. The lessons of dependence on Russia for energy have not been learned as there is massive reliance on China for raw material supplies, such as 100% of rare earth elements, 97% of magnesium and 79% of lithium. It does not bode well for a European carbon-free future and desire to avoid reliance on oil.
Reuters ran the following two days later.
Nobody in the US, Australia or Asia, for example, would dream of imposing a siesta. Final consumption expenditure (spending on goods and services to satisfy individual needs or the collective needs of the community) was similar in Europe and the US in 2008, but Europe has since stagnated while the US is up over 50%.
Retiring overseas
According to The Australian, almost 10,000 Australians retire overseas each year, attracted by numerous benefits:
“Whether those Australians are drawn to the lower cost of living, quality of life, or just a change of view, there’s a lot to be excited about international living.”
The article details many possibilities, including in Spain where we have just visited:
“One of the preferred retirement locations for our friends over in the United Kingdom, Spain is increasing in popularity with Aussie retirees too. With thousands of kilometres of coastline, Spain rivals Australia as a retirement destination for retirees seeking world class access to the ocean and sea. There’s even a national park or two for the explorers.
Retiring overseas to Spain is another attractive European option for Australians, particularly given it is one of the 31 countries Australia has a bilateral social security agreement with, meaning you can access your pension from there. Given the lower cost of living, retirement looks like a dream in Alicante or Bilbao, or even the more metropolitan cities of Madrid and Barcelona.”
Lower cost of living in Bilbao and Barcelona? Quality of life? Not based on our experience. Friends have just returned from Greece and were shocked by the prices. Of course, travel expenditure is not a good guide to how the general population spends, but at an exchange rate of 0.55 to 0.6, it's almost double the amount of Aussie dollars for every euro. The quick lunch that looks a reasonable €30 is a comparable $50. We told ourselves to think dollars equals euros but that’s not a fair comparison when considering retirement’s “lower cost of living”.
It's all very well for someone from rainy Manchester or Leeds or Birmingham to move to sunny Spain for a better retirement in the warmth, but it’s hardly a motivation for most Australians. And despite what the article says, sitting around a Spanish or Italian or Greek village all day, away from friends and family, would drive many Australian retirees stir-crazy. It’s sounds ideal but the beach taverna can quickly become tiresome. Do your research and give it a short try before making a commitment as it’s tough to top the lifestyle (and coffee) of Australia.
Experiencing versus remembering
The Eiffel Tower looks the same although security is much tighter. The monuments of Barcelona and Berlin have been there for hundreds of years, and they haven’t changed in 40 years, although more of Gaudi’s amazing Sagrada Familia Basilica is finished. The astonishing cathedral in Cologne took 632 years to build so decades mean little. It’s still a pleasure to walk the old parts of great cities, sit by their rivers and ports, enjoy the differences.
The biggest travel change is the way technology has made the experience easier, as Google maps beat paper maps every time, and payments and communications and translating are light years ahead.
But there are the same hassles nobody talks about when they rave about their holidays. Travel to and from airports and train stations requires careful planning and checking. Packing every few days and carting luggage around is irksome. Deciding where to eat is tricky and time-consuming, and reviews can be misleading. Avoiding the common tourist traps takes effort, and many European cities are targets for pickpockets. While Europe oozes old-world charm, it's often grimy and untidy away from the tourist highlights.
I long ago accepted that my ‘remembering’ of holidays is better than my ‘experiencing’. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman of behavioural economics fame describes how the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ are totally different and poorly correlated. He offers this thought experiment in his bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow:
“Imagine that you are considering several options for your next vacation and you reach a decision. You now learn that at the end of the vacation all your pictures and video will vanish. Furthermore, you will take an amnesic drug that will wipe out all the memories of the vacation. Would you still choose the same vacation? Would you be willing to pay as much for it?”
I look back on our travel experiences with fondness, especially when my wife compiles a photobook of highlights. But at the time of the actual trip, the experience is often tiring and not one jolly event after another. It’s as if travel is an investment in the future, a stock of good memories to spice up conversation and imagination.
This 2023 trip is too close to rank with the one 40 years ago. European travel as a 25-year-old was a unique adventure for sights and senses. For those suffering European FOMO when travellers return … remember, we only talk about the good bits, and Australia is a great place to live and travel. Retire overseas? Not a chance.
Graham Hand is Editor-At-Large for Firstlinks. This article is general information.