Ben Groundwater says budget airlines give backpackers much more freedom to roam

Budget airlines. That’s the reason why backpackers today have more freedom to roam than the backpackers of 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, or even 40.

Consider this. I started backpacking 20 years ago, when there was no Tiger, no Scoot, no Ryanair, no AirAsia. I had to save huge amounts of money to get anywhere interesting. I spent two years saving for flights for my first trip away.

I spent two years saving for my first trip away

You don’t have to do that now. You can get to Thailand or Vietnam for a week’s salary. You can get to Europe if you scrimp for a couple of months.

Yes, in some ways it was definitely better to be a backpacker back in the day. You could just disappear if you wanted to. You could go anywhere and be anyone and check back in with the occasional  handwritten letter.

You’d sit around hostel social areas and everyone would talk to each other. Talk! You’d ask other travellers for advice – where have you been, where did you stay, what was it like – rather than just searching for it on Google. You’d take a punt on a destination, just show up and see how you go, rather than having everything locked in in advance.

Now you can get to Thailand or Vietnam for a week’s salary

You’d keep a private journal instead of writing a public blog. You’d barely take photos of anything; you just wouldn’t care about photography at all. You’d see travel as the search for experience rather than as a quest for content.

But some things are better now, undeniably.

Hostels are better. Have you been in a modern-day hostel? They’re clean and beautiful and thoughtfully designed. They have USB charging points on the bunk beds. They have en suite bathrooms that don’t require shower thongs. And they have these things because everyone is reviewing them, constantly, and they need good ratings.

Tours are better. There’s a wider range of options available, those that go past the standard boozy 10-days-10-countries whip-arounds of old. Tours have a social conscience now. They have themes. They provoke ideas.

There’s also far more possibility for independent travel now. It used to be that you’d do a tour because you didn’t know much about the place you were visiting, you wanted to get a feel for it before setting out on your own. Now, you can do all of your research from home, or from the bus on your way to work, or anywhere, really, and then go it alone.

Modern backpackers get to travel to so many new destinations as well. As the number of travellers worldwide has increased, so has infrastructure, opening up the possibility of visiting places that would once have been thought of as for the hardcore only. Now you can go to Guatemala and Laos, to Morocco and Romania, and barely consider yourself adventurous at all.

And how will you get there? You’ll fly. On a budget airline, most probably. With a fare that makes the destination accessible to all.