It is an obvious statement and perhaps just another sign that we’re not as tech savvy as our children’s generation. Or, maybe its just another indication that we’ve been on the planet long enough to see the whole world change. When we booked our latest trip, we did it all using apps on our phone. The hotel, car, and airline. In fact, the idea of where to go on our next trip came from using an app to explore our options. We’ve obviously booked plenty of trips on our computers, but this was the first time that we booked the entire trip on our phone (stop snickering at us).
We’re really not trying to do a “we remember when” post, but when we think back to some of early trips, the differences are striking. On one of our trips, we had gone into a state park on the weekend to see some old wagon wheels and the ruts that are permanently carved into the limestone from settlers crossing the Oregon trail. As luck would have it, we got a flat and the car that we had just recently purchased, didn’t have a jack. No big deal, right, just call roadside assistance. Oh, that was in the days before cell phones, we’d be better off with smoke signals. And since it was a Sunday, there was no park staff, so we were faced with some of us hiking the five miles back to the closest service station while everyone else stayed with the car. Luckily we found someone working on a pump after about a mile and a good Samaritan had stopped to assist.
We’ve gone from travel agents to online searching, to travel sites, to travel apps. We’ve become so dependent on these technologies that we can barely remember how it was back in the Stone Age that was our early days of travel. What would we do if we didn’t TripAdvisor to tell us what others have thought of a place. How could we possibly survive without flight notifications on our phones or even having our boarding passes on our phones. Imagine the hours spent comparing travel sites before we had all of the travel search engines promising to get you the best deals (and some of them really do 😉 ). And what if the plane doesn’t have WIFI, what are supposed to do, use pencils and paper, those barbarians. So much for our trip down memory lane, time to grab our phones and prepare for the upcoming trip to Iceland.