Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Australians and New Zealanders who live very far from other countries?

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-few-Americans-travel-abroad-compared-to-Australians-and-New-Zealanders-who-live-very-far-from-other-countries

Mickie S:

Hands up any Australian who has ever been to the USA and hasn’t heard, “Australia! I’d love to go to Australia!” I can’t count how many times I heard it, from my very first trip there.

Somebody would say that to me and I’d say, “Why don’t you go then?”. Then the backpedalling would start. “It’s so far, it takes so long to get there, it costs so much, if only I had the time.”

I’d be thinking to myself it is exactly the same distance from the USA to Australia as it is from Australia to the USA, but I managed it. They seemed to like the idea of travelling, but when it came to doing something about it, suddenly all kinds of obstacles appeared.

So many of my family and friends and I too just decided we wanted to go somewhere, and we did it. We got our passports in order and saved enough to pay for the trips and off we went. Most of us did it alone too. I can hardly remember travelling anywhere that I didn’t run into lone Australians or occasionally couples touring round all kinds of places.

But one thing I did notice was that when I ran into Americans overseas, they were almost always in groups, not always large tour groups, but almost never alone. I may be wrong, but it seemed as if they were never comfortable unless they were sharing the experience with at least a few fellow Americans. I am not talking about loud obnoxious types complaining that it wasn’t the good old USA, but just normal nice every day people. They didn’t seem to be comfortable without at least a few other Americans around.

I can’t help wondering if that is part of the reason at least. Australians and Kiwis have to travel just as far to get there, and much further to get to the UK and Europe. If you decide to travel, it is very easy if you are confident doing it alone. You just pack your bags and go, and that is what most of us do, when we are young at least. It just doesn’t seem to work the same way for Americans.

And something I heard multiple times from others only in America. “A girl/woman travelling alone! You’re so brave!”

Daniel Gerber:

I have thought about this a lot, but as a normal person it’s hard to tease out all the confounding variables and suchlike. But here’s my intuitions:

Maybe the difference isn’t as great as it seems. If you go to Central America there’s a heap of Americans there, so to some degree it’s that Australians travel in different parts of the world than Americans. There’s also a lot of Americans overseas with the Peace Corps and stuff like that, often away from the tourist trails.
Culture. Australia has always had this culture of travel. It’s still a rite of passage for us to work in the UK for a year or two after high school or after university. We still have a cultural cringe towards both the UK and the USA. Many Americans think that they’re the best country on earth; very few Australians think Australia is the best country on earth. Look at our culture … even “Waltzing Matilda” is about a traveller (although not international). Look at some of the iconic Aussie rock songs: “I still call Australia home” (with lines like “I’m always wand’ring, I love being free”), “Down Under”, “I am, You are, We are Australian” (more about celebrating people who travelled to Australia, but still very much about migration and travel).
Likewise, I feel like Australians perhaps idolise this idea of “the bush” perhaps a bit more than Americans do (in the USA this idolatry of rural areas and farmers is more tied up with conservatism than it is in Australia). We like to think we’re tough, resourceful, and like to test our metal. In today’s modern world, particularly in the almost clinical Australian cities, the best way we can do that is to travel.
I’ve heard Americans say “Why would I leave the USA? We’ve got everything I want here and it might be dangerous over there”. I’ve never heard an Australian say that.
Americans are less geographically literate. I don’t know why that is, but it’s obvious that it would impact on their likelihood of travel.
It’s cheaper for us to go overseas than to go to many of the more interesting places in our own country. This isn’t really true for the USA because of much higher populations leading to things like more competition on air routes (e.g. it’s cheaper to fly from Melbourne or Sydney to Kuala Lumpur than to Alice Springs; it’s cheaper to fly to Dubai than to fly to Broome.)
Australia is more expensive than the USA. This means that comparatively, things overseas seem even cheaper for us, and there’s even less incentive to holiday locally.
Our culture is pretty much the same all around the country (except that some places have much more and different Aboriginal culture than others), whereas for some Americans, other parts of their country must feel quite foreign. If I go to Brisbane it just feels like I’ve suddenly discovered a new suburb of Melbourne.
The big one is probably economic. It’s true that Americans are slightly richer than Australians by GDP(PPP) per capita (see here) but this is not as evenly distributed in the USA as in Australia. I feel like there are a lot of Americans who are really struggling to get by from day to day and for whom even an unexpected US$100 expense could cause them very serious trouble. For Australians, anybody with any fulltime job, even a really lousy one, should if they’re frugal, be able to save enough money for a flight to Bali and a couple of weeks there (well, not in Bali, but they could get a bus from there to somewhere cheaper). While it’s hard to measure inequality, the GINI coefficient shows the USA to be about 20% more unequal than Australia.
In a similar vein but more importantly, American student loans work differently than Australian ones, at least until recently. Likewise the health system. Forcing people to pay for expensive health insurance is one solution that kind of works for most Americans, but when an American goes travelling for a year or goes to work or volunteer in a poor country, there’s no way he or she could afford to keep paying for health insurance. Travel insurnace will only patch you up enough to get you back home. For young people this is probably not an issue, but for someone like me it would be. With my pre-existing condition it’s nice that I know that if I get badly sick as long as I can survive the plane trip I’ll have free, world-class, medical care when I get home. There’s no way I could afford to pay the commercial rate for American health insurance while I’m living in China or travelling on the cheap.
Australian workplaces are generally more flexible. In the USA, high-skilled employees can get “sabbaticals” and longer annual leave and suchlike, but lower workers often only get one or two weeks per year, which is not enough for travel. In Australia, four weeks annual leave is the law, and by being a bit creative and not having holidays one or two years, I was able to take about one five-week holiday every year for many yaers while working full time, or two shorter trips. This got me addicted to travel, and my employer then kindly gave me a one-year leave without pay, meaning I didn’t need to worry about finding work when I got back … a few years later they gave me another one. I eventually quit, but I’m grateful to them. Since I was by no means indispensable, I don’t think this would happen at many workplaces in the USA. But the big thing is that we get four weeks annual leave, by law (although of course not everybody gets this, there are many casual employees for instance) whereas many in the USA only get one or two weeks.
The USA’s tax regime which tries to tax all Americans, even those that have never set foot in the USA, discourages some people from living and working in developing countries, where the salaries are lower and so in effect their American tax rate is higher.

Dominic Frank:

New Zealand there is a real push to travel as an important rite of passage especially for the young, and also as a cultural requirement, which harks back to my grandparents generation who actually thought they were British. Yes alot of kiwis and Australians (it was the same for Australians) today don’t realise this but up until 80–100 years ago people in these counties identifed as British. All the magazines they read, the t.v. and movies they watched, the radio, was British. British was the suprerior world culture they believed. This began to change with the ANZAC experience in WW1.

My point is that as a colonial, a “British subject" it has always been an thing to return to the motherland. The centre of culture. Much like individuals inhabiting the outreaches of the Roman Empire would make a pilgrimage to Rome once in a lifetime and Greeks in say Bactria (modern day Uzbekistan) back to Attica. Its the same impulse. This may sound a bit wacky but its true! Thats where this expectation to travel comes from in the culture of these two country's. Its deeply ingrained in the collective psyche and harks back to our colonials roots. Even today the vast majoirty of young still choose the UK, specifically London, over everywhere else

America, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. They believe they are -rightly or wrongly-the centre of the universe. America is also a vast and diverse land with much to offer, so much entertainment and stimulation, the need to travel internationally is not pressing.

Mark Roberts:

The culture of Australia and NZ remains very British in many small ways, so travel to Britain feels very natural; Europe is just across the Channel, and why not stop over somewhere exotic on the way there?

Maybe Americans don’t have the same “easy introduction” to overseas travel.

Donald Eigendorff:

Part of the answer lies within your question - the distance from other countries. Yes, fewer American travel abroad than say Australians or New Zealanders, but there are many factors, other than nationality, at play. Many Americans travel abroad, but because of geography (distance), Americans, like Europeans, have access to a wider variety of places to visit closer to home. The US is huge and very culturally diverse in and of itself - a trip to NYC alone can often offer a taste of the world - not literally of course. We can travel to places like Puerto Rico, with its own unique culture and beauty, without leaving the country. Canada, with cities like Montreal, Quebec, and Vancouver, is just to the north - often in driving distance. And Mexico, is just to our south - so cities like Mexico City and Oaxaca, present very unique travel opportunities fairly close to home. Of course, traveling abroad is a wonderful experience, and many, many Americans travel quite widely. However, I think economic status has more to do with peoples travel habits than their nationality. In my opinion, Americans with the means to travel are not very different than Australians or New Zealanders with the means to travel. Also, the two-week vacation thing is hardly the rule. Depending on the amount of time on the job, and flexibility at your workplace, time off cany vary widely and is very often more than two weeks.

Sadly, I have not been to Australia or New Zealand, and I would love to see both. Air travel time and cost to a certain degree are factors, and flying these days is not a pure delight, maybe an understatement. So, for me, and at my age, a country like Mexico offers endless places of interest and the opportunity to use and improve my Spanish.

Suzie Q:

Probably because Australians are more adventurous than Americans. We want to learn through experience instead of what others tell us.

Bob Singleton:

Most Americans think this is a map of the world.

Therefore they have no interest or desire to travel outside the comfort of what they know.

Outside this self-imposed prison lays socialism, communism, Islam and people who drive on the other side of the road.

Why would a goldfish want to know what lies beyond the confines its bowl as long as it was being fed and is allowed to carry an AK47 or AR15 while shopping in Walmart?

Why leave your house when have Deliveroo, television and good internet speed?

Best regards Bob

Brian Greve:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Australians who live very far from other countries?

Because America is very environmentaly diverse and they don't have the relationship Europeans share with each other.

When Americans vacation it's usually to relax or to explore nature. This is why the Caribbean and Mexico have great tourism industries for their beautiful beaches and why Yellowstone and other national parks are so popular

Americans also tend to not really have a relationship with the rest of the world. The closest would be Europe and I've known a lot of people that visit the places where their families came from but besides that nobody really cares enough to fly hours and hours just for the novelty of going there. There's no deep relationship between America and the rest of the worlds history so your average vacationer won't really care all that much unless they have a reason to (family, www vets, history buffs). That's not to say nobody cares, just enough people to make it a trend, and enough for you to notice and ask this question.

That being said, Australia doesn't have the biodiversity that america has so there isn't much internal exploration and it also had a much stronger relation with the British leading up to it's independence which maybe lead to a stronger relationship between them and by extension the rest of Europe and by that extension the rest of the world. I'm just guessing here I'm not Australian so don't take my word for it, I just hate seeing the neverending “cause america is dumb" responses to these kind of questions

Ryan Isaacs:

I would wager that the need to go overseas to find what one is looking for would be a major factor.

The United States has remarkable diversity. There is every kind of ecosystem you can think of there and sizeable cultural differences from state to state. A New Yorker is going to have a completely different experience in, say, Arizona than at home. Meanwhile, Australian culture is not as diverse geographically. Our most pressing cultural divide is whether you say “scallop” or “potato cake”. New Zealand is similar in this way.

Australia also has a lot of ecological diversity, but all the interesting stuff tends to be where few people live, so there is little infrastructure and it becomes harder to visit. It can be easier, quicker, and sometimes cheaper (Australia is an expensive place to visit, even if you’re already here), to fly overseas than to visit some parts of Australia. New Zealand is easier to get around, but that may actually make it less appealing for a holiday if you’re already there. Why spend a couple of weeks to see Milford Sound when you could do it in a long weekend? Also, like Australia, New Zealand can be quite expensive.

I know this kind of question isn’t a place where politics should come into it, but there is also a political element to all of this. A large part of right-wing thinking in the US is centred on America being the greatest place on Earth by every possible metric. The word “European” is often thrown around as an insult in these circles. To leave the US, even for a holiday, would be admitting that there might be something worth seeing outside of it.

Australia and New Zealand have people who think this way, but not in the sheer numbers that the United States does.

Chris Price:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Australians who live very far from other countries?

Americans only get two weeks of paid holidays per year compared to four weeks for Australians who also get paid long service leave of two months every ten year.

And it’s because Australia is so far from the rest of the world that Australians are eager to travel to it and when they do it, they go for a long trip and travel all around the globe visiting many countries at once.

Eric Wright:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

Because canada has very little to offer whereas the united states has sooo much different landscapes and places to go to. You could go to any of the national parks, state parks throughout the US, There’s florida’s beaches, california beaches, big rocky mountains in idaho, montana, wyoming, colorado, utah, canyonlands southwest, southern bayou, and the plains (though i don’t know why anyone would go to the plains). Canada has BC which has lots of nice parks and mountains and lakes and the rocky mountains, and theres western alberta with banff and jasper, and theres the yukon which is pretty nice too, and then theres like baffin island but only a certain type of person would go there (climbers especially). Theres pretty much nothing east of west alberta besides the places i mentioned

Tony Gilbert:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

62% of Canadians have passports as opposed to 42% of USA citizens, which would seem to imply that more Canadians are, at least, geared up to travel to other countries.

Robert Walker:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

I wonder if the poster realizes a great many American colleges and universities send their students abroad for a semester or two? They have schools and programs located in foreign countries.

A great many American movies are made in foreign countries also. The producers send actors, production crews into them to make films the whole world may watch.

A great many American businesses/corporations conduct business in foreign countries with many American employees sent to them to oversee the operations.

Many American churches and missionaries conduct evangelical efforts in foreign countries. Practically every American religious denomination has churches overseas in foreign countries. The Mormon Church sends missionaries on two years programs to many foreign countries.

Many American symphony orchestras travel to foreign countries on occasion to compete in competitions and to perform. There are over a thousand city symphony orchestras in the US.

Many American athletes travel overseas joining some foreign teams and competing in various competitions of an international nature, the PanAmerican games, the Olympics, the National Hockey League. American athletes are sometimes members of the Canadian football leagues and baseball teams.

And of course, there are American embassies and consulates in other foreign countries to which the US has sent its diplomats. So, there are a lot of Americans traveling to foreign countries when all these activities are taken into account. But it is true, there also are a lot of workaholic Americans who feel tied to their jobs, and gain satisfaction through their work rather than traveling.

Tony deAraujo:

The United States is composed of 50 different States. Even within States, the cultural diversity is phenomenal.

This question assumes that most Americans don’t travel abroad, which is incorrect.

Some Americans (probably millions) never go anywhere, except perhaps for a long weekend in the Bahamas, or Cancun. This has to do with the limited free time available.

I’ve lived most of my life in the United States, but I’ve been around the world and worked in several different Continents.

In fact, with the exception of one or two friends, I don’t know anyone in America that hasn’t traveled to other countries for business or pleasure.

Yes, there are pockets of Americans that don’t care to travel (or can’t afford to take the time off, or even pay for traveling expenses), but that is a minority, and most other countries have pockets like these as well.

The United States of America is made up of people from all over the world. They have roots abroad and they visit their families outside of the country.

When we speak of “Americans”, we compare them with people from other countries such as France, England, and Australia… That’s comparing apples with bananas. Americans should be compared to Europeans (as of European Community), or any other Union of countries. Other than that, we need to compare France with Texas, or England with California, perhaps New Jersey with Portugal. That’s more appropriate.

The Americans I know, travel extensively.

By the way, there is no difference between an Englishman traveling to Portugal and a New Yorker traveling to Florida. The United States is composed of 50 different countries plus territories. No passport is need for interstate traveling.

Paul DiGianfrancesco:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

A vareity of reasons - some don’t get vacation time or enough time off to make such a trip. Many can’t afford it. Some just might not like to travel.

Also the US is a vast country with many unique and (sometimes very) different cultures. One could easily spend many years - if not a lifetime - exploring them all. Add to that we have Canada to the north and Mexico to the south - two equally vast and diverse countries - that can be an easy trip for most US citizens.

Albert Hall:

UK29/05/21 Believe it or not because they are frightened of the NATIVES and the majority of Americans some 75% do not even have a passport. During my RAF Service I served with members of the USAF [ during the 60’s when the USA still had conscription] in the UK. Most of them could not have pointed out wher they were on a World Atlas. Not only that but most of then could not see any reason to do so beRAF guys cause eveything was just another ‘bit of America] or it was on no consequence to us they were naive beyond comprehension EXCEPT those that were not and THEY ran the rackets the Black Markets in tobacco and booze and the Girls.

Anybody in the USAF who served at RAF/USAF ALCONBURYin the UK at the time will be familiar with the ‘CORBY COMMANDOS’ who wore no knickers and had the price of the soles of their shoes !

A B:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

Q; Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

A:

More Canadians are outside of Canada by percentage because Canada has fewer job opportunities. Now, for those who make the effort to relocate overseas, they naturally travel more than those who don’t. I remember many years ago, Canadian prime minister, Jean Chretien, once remarked those Canadians who don’t wish to come home are welcome to stay outside, or something like that.

Kevin Gordon:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

Is there any statistics that show on a per capita basis, Canadians travel abroad significantly more than Americans? I am not sure its a significant amount more. Further does this question relate to recreational travel or business travel or both?

I feel like Recreational travel abroad is just not something a lot of Americans are super interested in. The have alternatives… lots of them.

So here’s a question to an American

Would you rather travel to Florence and be inundated by tourists everywhere, or go to Paris and stand in a lineup for 6 hours to see the Louvre, or would you rather go camping near or at the Grand Canyon, or Olympic Peninsula, or Coachella, or visit Orlando or Anaheim, etc. Or would you rather spend time in your own back yard or workshop honing your hobby based carpentry skills?

Recreational travel abroad is just not that appealing to many Americans

Rob Bell:

Originally Answered: Why do so few Americans travel abroad compared to Canadians who live very far from other countries?

It’s easier and cheaper to travel within the country. There’s plenty to see and do here. You don’t have to worry about people getting on you just because of where you come from.

And there’s some like me who simply dislike foreigners. The last thing I’d do is put myself at the mercy of another country. I have no interest in how they live or if they do at all for that matter. I’d very much like if they’d stop coming here as well.