The Good Old Days of Travel Are Now

Happy New Year from the other side of the equator and dateline!

When you are shoehorned into a standard airline seat with the passenger behind you drilling his knees into your back and the one in front of you reclining his seat to your nose, it’s easy to think the good old days of travel are gone.

Well, to see in 2025 on an optimistic note, Partout is here to say . . . out with that old idea and in with the new one that the good old days of travel are NOW.

Sure, there are the crummy airplane hours to get anyplace, but a month of travel in Southeast Asia impressed us that we’ve never had it so good as travelers. Not to be left out of the season of Top 10s and Best Ofs, here are Partout’s Top 12 Reasons the Good Old Travel Days Are Now.

#12: Smoke-free airplanes

No reconsideration of the good old travel days is complete without remembering they were filled with cigarette smoke. It’s hard today to imagine being immobilized in a haze of second-hand smoke for hours, but anyone who flew before 1990 did it. No good old days there.

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#11: Fixed-rate taxi rides

Remember being mobbed at the airport or station by taxi drivers hawking a ride, grabbing your bags, quoting highway-robbery fares and then asking for still more when you got to your destination? Now even in smaller cities, authorized taxi concessions are set up inside airport terminals to tell you the regulated fare, take your payment, print your destination out for the driver, direct you to your waiting cab and see you off swiftly and peacefully. We’ll take that any day.

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#10: E-tickets instead of paper tickets

As the victim of several harrowing paper ticket mishaps there is no need to elaborate on, Doris is especially appreciative of travel tickets and boarding passes that can’t fly away, wash away or otherwise get away and have to be replaced.

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#9: Currency conversion apps

“If one silk scarf costs 500,000 Vietnamese dong or 1 million dong for three, how many USD do you need to buy two scarves?” For anyone who has ever found currency thought problems challenging, a phone app that instantly converts 25,000 Vietnamese dollars to $1 is a godsend. (Scarf answer: 750,000 dong because the vendor will not give the same price break for two scarves as for three.)

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#8: Free public wifi

Remember when you could get free wifi in a Motel 6 but had to pay $10/day (or more) at a Hilton? Or couldn’t get wifi at all? It’s hard to believe, but free public wifi has been around 20 years now. Before that? Bad old days. Do we miss them on the road?

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#7: Google Translate

English is spoken more widely than ever before but for those places where it’s not, Google Translate is waiting in the wings 24/7. We find this especially helpful when a local alphabet is a series of bubbles or other marks we can’t sort out enough to type into a search.

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#6: Ride-sharing apps

Here’s a choice: Haggle with a taxi driver in a language you don’t speak and then dig through a mishmash of unfamiliar bills and coins to come up with a fare that may or may not be fair? OR give Uber or Bolt or Grab or any other ride-sharing app your destination and be swept off the curb a few minutes later and deposited at your destination you with no cash exchange? The good old days of now win again.

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#5: AI assist

Artificial intelligence may eventually wipe out the human race but, until then, it is our new go-to research tool. We used it more than any other single source to plan our SE Asia month and, just as constantly, to refine plans once we were there. Perplexity is our favorite.

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#4: ATMs and other cash dispensaries

Traveler check usage peaked in 1995 and has been all downhill since then – hallelujah. We love using ATMs for local cash, but it’s just one of many better alternatives to the once-indispensable traveler’s check. Even American Express knows that. The company stopped issuing its eponymous checks altogether in 2020.

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#3: GPS/Google maps

We absolutely love maps and globes (Doris still has a Thomas Bros map book for San Diego), but what paper map ever talked you to your destination or told you where the nearest gas station was? Paper maps and globes are great for the big picture. GPS navigation is what keeps us from being lost on the ground.

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#2: T-Mobile free international data roaming

Is there anything from the bad old days of travel to compete with a telephone provider that equips you to order a ride, check in for a flight, navigate to a restaurant, translate a sign or access any other travel hack or app free in pretty much any country on earth? At the risk of sounding like shills, that’s what we get from T-Mobile, which makes it almost as indispensible as. . . .

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#1: Smart phones

Maybe none of us owned an IMB Simon Personal Communicator that kicked off the smart phone back in 1994, but every one of us owns one of its technological descendants. Without them, there’s no international data, no GPS on the go, no ride-sharing, no lots of things.

Give us the good old now days any travel day.

Your Turn

What did we miss? If we’ve overlooked your personal favorite improvement over the good old days or overstated the case for one of ours, please use the comment box to share your thoughts.

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