The long‐term rise in overseas travel by Americans, 1820–2000¹

Abstract

How and when did the 'great tourist invasion of Europe' come about? Although a few writers have tried to characterize the rise in travel, their descriptions are almost exclusively narrative with colourful opinions and very little quantitative evidence. This is our attempt to fill in the gap.We have linked together several series on overseas travel in order to produce a consistent long-term series covering the period 1820 to 2000, and have also constructed a new time series on passenger fares for much of the period in which ocean travel was the means of going abroad. We use these new data, along with other evidence on GDP per capita, air fares, exchange rates, and indexes of technological change in the travel industry, in an attempt to explain the long-term rise in overseas travel.I nternational travel has long been a rapidly growing part of the US economy.The number of overseas travellers has risen enormously from not much more than 1,000 annually in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to well over 25 million each year. 3 Expenditures on travel abroad and passenger fares paid to foreign flag carriers now amount to roughly 30 per cent of all service imports in the US International Accounts. 4 Despite this historical success and current importance, not much has been written about the economic history of overseas travel by Americans. How, and even when, did what Boorstin has called the 'great tourist invasion of Europe' come about? 5 Although a few writers have tried to characterize the rise in travel, their descriptions are almost exclusively narrative with colourful opinions and very little quantitative evidence. This is our attempt to fill in the gap. We have linked together several series on overseas travel in order to produce a consistent long-term series covering the period 1820 to 2000, and have also constructed a new time series on passenger fares for much of the period in which ocean travel was the means of going abroad.

First Cabin Fares from New York to the British Isles, 1826–1914

“…The share declined after the Civil War, but still remained above two-thirds up through World War I. (Dupont, Gandhi and Weiss, 2012). Although tourists embarked and disembarked at a number of different ports, New York dominated in terms of numbers of passengers (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1890, Table 153 , pp.…”

“…39 Does the negative correlation of first cabin fares and volumes, strongest for 37 Sources for the volume and price comparisons in this paragraph are listed under Figure 6 and Table A5 in the Appendix. 38 Dupont, Gandhi, and Weiss (2012) estimated an own price elasticity of -0.25 for all passengers to all international destinations. The estimated elasticity using the more restricted first class passengers and fares to the UK that are described in this paper is about -0.5.…”

“…39 As elaborated below, there are a number other factors at work, such as changes in income, in the price of tourist goods and services abroad, in exchange rates, and in the relative price of domestic travel that would need to be taken into account in any explanation. See Dupont, Gandhi and Weiss (2012) and Dupont and Weiss (2013).…”

“…44 For much of the nineteenth century the share of American travelers going to Europe ran between 75 and 90 percent. It declined somewhat after the Civil War, but still remained above two-thirds up through World War I, and even up through the Great Depression (Dupont, Gandhi and Weiss, 2012). Over the period 1900-14, 93 percent of first class passengers between the U.S. and Europe used the port of New York, and 42 percent of them traveled to and from ports in the British Isles (Keeling, 2008a).…”

“…In this paper we present a consistent series on passenger fares for North Atlantic travel in first cabin collected from newspaper and magazine advertisements for nearly a century of time, from 1826 to 1915. This series is a revised and extended version of that used by Dupont, Gandhi and Weiss (2012) in their study of the long-term trend in overseas travel. 5 The series presented here extends the time series backward another quarter of a century, increases the average number Page | 6 of fare quotations per year, and reduces the influence of seasonality on fares.…”