The whole idea we had of "booking a trip" or travelling once meant nothing more than walking into an office and telling a person where you wanted to go, and trusting them to work out how. But everything that led to even that idea began with a favor: arrangements written into ledgers for soldiers heading into the unknown, with nothing but someone's word that it would be taken care of.
That, to be precise, is ground zero…
The earliest ‘package tour’ came way later, with a few hundred passengers on a train, and a handwritten handbook standing in for what would later become the ‘travel brochure’. It took over a decade more before travel, food, and stay were first bundled into a single fare, called the package holiday, in the form we recognize today.
For over a century after that, not much changed in principle, only in scale. More brochures, more counters, more requests coming in from further afield. That growing scale showed up in surprising ways: royal regiments on the move, expeditions headed for mountains nobody had summited yet, a leader's careful passage to a conference that mattered more than most. Then, the first computerized reservation systems arrived, letting a booking be checked in seconds instead of days. And soon after, screens had mostly replaced paper at the counter.
It felt, at the time, like the future had arrived. It hadn't, not yet. That was only the beginning…
Then came the internet, and with it, travel booking websites. For the first time, people could search, compare, and book a trip without speaking to anyone at all. Within a decade, walking into an office to plan a holiday had stopped being the default for most travelers. The smartphone came next, and planning moved from a desktop session to something done at the tip of your fingertips while doing something else entirely. And today, artificial intelligence can draft an entire itinerary before you've finished describing what kind of trip you want.
Every one of those shifts felt like the biggest leap travel would ever take, until the next one came along.
With all of that said, this year’s theme for World Tourism Day 2026 is built around the latest one above, "Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism". And going by everything before it, this one's not an exception.
But even with every advancement, every shortcut, every clever new way to shave a minute off planning, there's one thing none of it has touched, and probably never will; the weight of the experience itself. Travel, when done right, still takes effort, and still asks something of you. It should change how you see a place, or how you see yourself, and that was never going to be automated. In fact, that's the only human part of it that remains. And that’s been true since long before brochures, before booking apps, before any of this. Even back when people set off with no real idea what they'd find, that was already the entire point.
The tools may have changed, but what travel is actually for hasn't.
Safe to say, we've been part of every one of these changes for over two and a half centuries now. And if there's one thing we've learned in all that time, it's this: in every journey you take, there’s something you can't put a finger on. It’s like the wind, or gravity. You can't see it, but you know it's there. There’s no drawing of it, no measure of how much it weighs. But it is the most valuable part of travel, the thing you love more and more with every passing mile, the thing you instantly miss the second a shortcut takes its place. The soul.
And for reasons even we can't fully explain, every journey we ever built has one. And always will. That's what we intend to protect, no matter how ‘fast’ everything around it gets…
