Out of Town

Pan am has been talking about a shuttle to the moon; Westinghouse is building a Deepstar to carry passengers to an underwater colony, to live and work 4000 feet below the surface of the ocean--before this decade is half over. You're not likely to go to either place in the near future, of course, unless you happen to be exceedingly brave and utterly fit, and part of the right program. But such journeys will come; and if you're in any of the conventional tourist spots on vacation toward the end of the Seventies--elbowing through the mob scene in the Place de la Concorde, studying the litter of people clinging to every cliff in Yosemite, rubbing the soot out of your eyes on smoggy Waikiki--you may wish that they would come soon.

For the fact is that the tourist business is moving into an enormous boom. The airlines are complaining that business isn't as good as expected, but what they mean is that passenger miles are up only about eight percent over last year, instead of the 12-14 percent that was calculated in the budget. The country has its troubles, but it still boasts an affluent society. Though there is no truth whatever in the popular notion that machines will soon do all the work, leaving people with endless empty time--in fact, one of our worst problems today is a desperate shortage of trained manpower to do all the things everybody wants done--four-week and even longer vacations are becoming commonplace. People reaching out for what were once the luxuries of the rich thus find travel one of the most accessible--especially when air fares are about the only things that actually cost less today than a decade ago. Add the rapidly rising incomes of west Europeans, plus the increasing curiosity of the Japanese (700,000 of whom went touring in 1969, up from roughly zero ten years before), and all those places everybody has to see are likely to become places you'll want to see exactly once.

Despite the numbers, though, the tasks of getting there and back and caring for yourself while you're there are likely to be made much easier as the Seventies progress, thanks to the growth of information-control systems and a telecommunications network to serve them. Today, the sort of personal attention most people want and some need while traveling is available only to the wealthy or to those who are willing to travel in guided groups. By some time in the second half of the decade, such services should be available at much lower cost, without the restrictions on your freedom inherent in guided situations. In fact, by 1980, you should be able to get a preview of any of hundreds of possible vacations by pushing some buttons on a gizmo beside your television set; then you'll be able to study potential air routes to your destination by pushing the buttons a different way and, finally, make reservations for a trip tailored to your own desires (flights, hotel rooms, car rentals, theater tickets) by pushing the buttons again.

Hotel-reservation services have already been computerized for the United States, parts of Europe and some resort areas, and the day is not far off when a single telephone call will produce information about availabilities in tourist-caliber hotels all over the world. More important, these services will be available to you while traveling, if you want to change your plans en route--something that's almost impossible now in high season, partly because your travel agent is far away and partly because neither he nor anyone else has quick access to changes in the status of reservations at the places you might wish to visit.

Once you pay for your trip (with your credit card, of course--cash is almost obsolete in travel now), the reservations machinery starts operating for you, establishing the channels of communication that move your bags from the air terminal at this end to your hotel at the other end without any need for you to stand around baggage areas. Processing luggage this way on international trips will, of course, require pre-inspection by customs at the airport of origin, but such facilities are already in use in Toronto and Nassau and present no planning problems. Any personal service--someone to meet you at the airport, shopping service where you don't know the stores or the language--can be attended to at about the same prices such luxuries would cost at home. Overall, you will have the comfort of knowing that wherever you go. there will be someone who expects you. who speaks English and who can be reached with a telephone call.

Organizing such a system is, obviously, a complicated job. A much simpler air-reservations system for American Airlines cost an estimated $90,000,000 of IBM's and A.A.'s money before it could be made to work; and even now, SABRE, as the system is known to its friends, is kept on older IBM 7094 computers, because everyone is worried about the bugs it might develop if transferred to one of IBM's newer, faster and bigger 360 series. What was probably the largest single venture in computerizing reservations for accommodations--the Computicket plan to allot campsites in California state parks--went broke along with the rest of Computicket in early 1970. My office estimates that fully developed services of this nature are unlikely until near the end of the decade, because the costs will stay too high until the computer-communications net is fully operational for all sorts of activities, not just travel.

But special-purpose information systems for travelers are much easier to run and before 1975, a number of "club" arrangements should be established and flourishing. Such clubs wouldn't try to cover the globe, but they could handle all their members' travel needs in, say, 50 cities. On the other hand, by restricting their membership and coverage, they could offer greater services; they could guarantee their members hotel rooms at short notice, for example, by booking rooms in the club's own name, according to computerized predictions of members' travel habits. The fee would cover any losses from stockpiling rooms that members don't claim and that hotels won't take back. Clearly, such clubs would make their first appeal to businessmen, but the organizations that now run group-fare plans could expand to club status easily enough. The economics of these organizations would call for shared data banks--"inquiry systems"--and once the computer memories are properly stuffed and programmed, the transmogrification of groups into clubs is merely a matter of salesmanship.

The travel clubs of the future will be a far cry from the guided tours of the Sixties, because the devices that give access to information will enable individuals to split off from their clubs, for shorter or longer periods, pretty much as they wish. Nevertheless, the growth of clubs will undoubtedly lead to bigger hotels, bigger resorts, planned to serve as many special interests as the acreage can contain. Especially in areas where the obvious demand is seasonal--which means any accessible mountainous region or semitropical climate--the locals will try for special facilities, from convention halls to climate-controlled indoor tennis courts to raceways for beach buggies and snowmobiles. Some of this increasing complexity of activities may come with diminishing service--more buffet meals rather than captains and waiters, fewer bellhops around to light your cigar. The travel arrangements of the youth world--from the established European bikers' hostel to the new swinging club facility with its homogenized food--are likely models for the future. There's some sense in trying to make the traveler feel like a king, but a club wants to be up and doing.

In this country, the where is going to be what President Nixon's political advisors call the Sun Belt, from Florida through Arizona to California--and Hawaii (at increasing distances from overcrowded Honolulu). Keep an eye especially on the Florida panhandle and the Gulf Coast of Alabama, both presently underdeveloped as resort areas and glorious to visit in spring and fall. South of the border, the west coast of Mexico is already burgeoning into a Spanish-speaking Monterey--and it's not impossible that there will be interesting prospects in Baja California, whose exotic countryside is now inhabited mostly by iguana.

In general, increasing urbanization carries with it an increase in the desire to get out of the city. Even the recession didn't kill the demand for second homes, places out in the woods or along the coast where a man can forget about what went on during the work week. Like much else that looks new, this is yesterday's pie in the sky, brought to reality in the bakeries of affluence. The people who bought that real-estate promoter's acre of desert in the Southwest are moving to it; and up North, the hillsides are being subdivided for sale to city dwellers who will find some way to get there.

The best bet for the money, of course, as the hippies and communards learned early, is the abandoned farmhouse that comes equipped with a well and some kind of dirt road to truck in food and building supplies. However, where the woods are in process of development with roads, water supplies, sewers and schools, the land that's supposedly away from it all may go for $5000 a quarter acre. But if you're really equipped to make your own way, physically and psychologically, there's still a lot of land less than three hours' drive from any city in the East, one hour from any city elsewhere, that can be bought for less than $500 an acre. More and more people will be availing themselves of these bargain-basement pieds-à-terre as the decade advances.

But for those who have little desire to homestead or who find tent living a less-than-relaxing respite from their high-rise or suburban existence, the second home on wheels may well be the answer. Parked in the driveway and ready to roll with the call of the wild, these new traveling homes are changing the image of camping from the blue-collar vacation to the weekend getaway of the affluent society. Already, such recreational vehicles as the slide-on camper that fits the back of a pickup truck, the buslike luxury home on wheels and car-pulled trailers fitted with the latest accouterments for comfort are commonplace on the nation's highways. Even more traveling homes designed to fit the requirements of the most discriminating or the simplest of tastes are scheduled to appear in the next few years.

But with increasing numbers of vacationers taking to the road, established camping grounds inevitably will become even more like the cities people are trying to avoid. For most of them, you need a reservation, or soon will. And yet there are still the unorganized places to which you can bike, hike or drive, still much as they were 100 years ago but will not be 100 years from now.

For most people, however, travel means something more than a pleasure dome, a retreat or a mobile home: It means a chance to make contact with--and, if possible, to experience--a life style very different from the folkways back home. Most potential hosts, moreover, are eager to encourage those who might wish to come adventuring among them. Tourism is a highly desirable industry: It allows an underdeveloped country to sell its most plentiful resource (unskilled or slightly skilled labor) for foreign exchange that can be used to buy anything from pig iron to power plants. And visitors put a country on the map. But they can also be uppity and boorish, insistent upon carrying their own culture with them wherever they go--a statement that applies to Germans and Swedes and English as well as to Americans. Some of the apparent best bets for future tourism are not going to enter the race, for political reasons.

"Take the North African coast," says an international-airline executive. "It's not desert--it's lush. No farther away than Europe. Beautiful country, good swimming, historical remains, exotic culture, interesting cuisine. But I wouldn't be willing to gamble on it, because they're not prepared to welcome Americans." (It should be noted that Hilton International disagrees with this analysis and is in business in Morocco.)

The one sure growth area seems to be the Caribbean, which has the world's guaranteed best climate and is as near as next door; from anywhere in the eastern half of the country, it costs less to fly to the Caribbean than to California. These Indies, of course, are by no means undiscovered country, but tourist development has barely touched most of them. "All those islands," an airlines man says greedily, "beaches and water and palm trees, most of them without a single hotel--yet."

Optimists at the airlines speak of Micronesia (goony birds circling Sheraton towers on glamorous Guam) and of East Africa (great game preserves organized to let hordes of tourists mingle with prides of lions). A few enthusiasts expecttens of thousands of Americans to discover an abiding calm in the foothills of the Himalayas. Some even expect a rush to New Zealand Australia, arguing that what the American tourist really wants is (continued on page 176) Out of Town (continued from page 146) to travel far and find a place like home. Such developments would be bonanzas for the airlines, because profits on long hauls are always better than profits on short hauls; the costs on the ground are about the same, regardless of the length of the flight (the company sells the same ticket, moves the same bags, pays the same landing and take-off charges to the airport), while the revenues rise for every additional mile flown.

Most analysts at the airlines, however, believe that these very long trips can't command a mass market in this decade, simply because the fares must stay too high. They are especially gloomy about prospects in South America ("always a sure place to go broke"). Distances are huge: Chicago is two hours nearer to any place in western Europe than it is to Rio de Janeiro. Social conditions are terrible and nearly certain to get worse in an area that couples the world's highest birth rate with the world's least effective governments. The Chilean Andes, which offer first-rate skiing when it's summertime up north, certainly look attractive, and so do the Chilean lakes, which doomsday experts regard as the safest civilized place to be if the bomb goes off--but for sociopolitical reasons, the travel forecasters don't even expect much from Chile.

Apart from the Caribbean, eastern Europe is the only region the smart money considers odds-on for major tourist development in the next half-dozen years. The Soviet Union itself may not make it, because the food and accommodations are terrible and unlikely to improve much (though in their unsuccessful bid for the 1976 Olympics, the Russians indicated a desire to pull up their socks in the tourist race), and because foreigners are allowed to move around the country only in the custody of approved tour guides. But the Warsaw Pact countries have been opening up fast. One of the big differences between the Russian crackdown on Hungary in 1956 and the one on Czechoslovakia in 1968 was that Prague was full of tourists as the Russian tanks clanked in, and they were not molested.

East European tourism, once established, can be maintained during off seasons by relatively large numbers of Americans traveling to catch a glimpse of ancestral soil. Prices will continue to be low by American and western-European standards; in 1970, the best hotel in Bucharest charged $14 top for a double room with bath. The visitor finds churches, museums, palaces and finely cultivated countryside little, if any, below the west European level, plus such exotica as boar hunts and professionally polished folk festivals--without the mob and the ritual (and the super-comfort) of west European travel. The rapid growth of interest in Yugoslavia throughout the Sixties--to the point where Dubrovnik is one of the most popular spots on the Continent, especially with the young--argues strongly for a big future to the east.

To date, the Rumanians have done more than any of the other east European countries to pull Western tourists. Ads for Mamaia, a Black Sea resort with white skyscraper hotels and beautiful girls in net bathing suits, can be found on billboards all over western Europe. Rural Rumania can offer spectacular hunting for the club market and some Danube gorges for the scenically minded; and Bucharest night life has forgotten its rather shallowly learned Marxism-Leninism. Bulgaria has even more Black Sea coast line than Rumania and a growing interest in foreign exchange other than rubles.

Eastern Europe also includes non-Communist Turkey and Greece, the last of which is good enough for Mrs. Onassis and, thus, must be good enough for lots of others, despite widespread hostility to its military junta. The Aegean has almost as many islands as the Caribbean (though they don't all have much drinking water) and the sea is so clear that it's dangerous for scuba divers, who usually judge their depth by how far they can see and thus go down deeper than they should.

Turkey shares the Aegean with Greece and the Black Sea with the Russians and their friends. Most Americans find the hustling, modern Turks extremely attractive; the cuisine ranks with the French and the Chinese as the world's best; and Istanbul has been one of the sights of the world ever since Constantine the Great raised his first column overlooking the Golden Horn. At Hierapolis (now Pamukkale), you can dive into hot mineral waters to explore a Roman ruin inundated when an earthquake changed the path of the hot springs. And the world's most storybookish, best-preserved medieval castle sits on the shore of the Bosporus, where you can sail your own boat, in the wake of a Russian destroyer, up from Istanbul to the Black Sea.

Getting to any of these places is likely to be less fun--but maybe less nuisance, too. The era of the big plane is already upon us; and the big plane--Lockheed honestly calls its version an airbus--is essentially an unglamorous, utilitarian vehicle. The Boeing 747 is a beautiful aircraft seen in flight; it's so big it seems to be going slowly, which is very dramatic. But inside, there are a great many people in an area too small to permit them to do the kinds of things the television commercials have been suggesting they can do.

One of the worst problems the airlines have had in this introductory year of the 747 has been the inability of the stewardesses to serve meals at the pace necessary to get 300-odd passengers fed at dinnertime. The logistics involve carts that must be wheeled down the two aisles. When the Fasten Seat Belts sign flashes off, however, everybody stands up and starts walking around, and the girls can't move the carts. On one of the early flights from Paris to New York, a 747 had to circle Kennedy Airport for 45 minutes to give the girls a chance to clear the trays. This problem will be licked, of course, perhaps the way Trans Caribbean licked a similar problem posed by convivial Latins on its 707: When the time comes to serve on Trans Caribbean, the captain turns on the seat-belt sign and solemnly warns of rough weather ahead, which clears the aisles. But no partitioning nor provision of sexy movies will wholly disguise the fact that a 747 moves about as many people as used to be found in cabin class on a big liner--in a space smaller than a cabin-class lounge.

Yet the 747 and its upcoming medium-range rivals, the Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed L-1011, represent an immense advance in the productivity of airplanes. Once they are in common use, they should assure a continuing decline in the per-mile price of air transportation. Because they can carry more people on fewer flights, they diminish clutter in the air lanes, waits for take-off and stacks for landing--and they give a much better cost-benefit ratio to the planning of really sophisticated computerized Air Traffic Control installations.

During the first half of this decade, the weak link in the chain of tourism is going to be the airport itself. In fact, our inability to handle the airport problem when introducing larger aircraft is a fascinating, rather scary demonstration of how difficult it is to change any ongoing system even in the face of the most obvious need. The Boeing 747 weighs so much that it can't cross the runway bridges at Los Angeles Airport; its engines create a different pattern of jet wake and its doors are so high that none of the existing ramps from waiting area to plane can be used. Worst of all, of course, is the sheer volume: The 747 swamps existing baggage-handling facilities, ticket lobbies, lounges, parking lots, roads. A few terminals are ready for it, (concluded on page 263) Out of Town (continued from page 176) but not many. Airline people estimate a lead time of three to seven years in expanding an existing airport, six to ten years in building a new one.

The huge financing headaches involved may be cured in the years ahead by a new airlines trust fund that dedicates to airport construction the proceeds of an additional three percent tax on domestic tickets. But runways and terminals and Air Traffic Control facilities are by no means the whole problem: People, baggage and cargo must be moved to and from the airport. Here, urban transit authorities, road builders and three layers of government are involved. The crisis has shown up first--in Europe as well as here--in the lack of parking spaces at many airports. Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, St. Louis, Los Angeles, London's Heathrow, Paris' Orly and other airports have either recently constructed multistory parking garages or are struggling to get them up in time to prevent collapse of the internal circulation system. The roads to the airport, however, are desperately inadequate almost everywhere. Every so often, planners wistfully suggest that the airlines relieve congestion by scheduling their flights at what are now off hours--especially since the on hours are those when commuters are trying to get home from jobs in the central city. But every time an airline tries rescheduling a flight from five P.M. to three, business drops by half.

In fact, there is no solution to road congestion on the way to the airport; some means of getting there other than the highway must be constructed. In Brussels, a high-speed rail link takes passengers and freight to the airport and in Cleveland, the subway has been extended to a terminal at the airport. New York has announced a special transit line to Kennedy and will doubtless build one eventually, though the design is still in the planning stage and financing difficulties are yet to be worked out.

Another possibility is the greatly expanded use of VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft--helicopters--to ferry passengers between central-city or suburban points and the terminal. Yet another is a shifting of relatively short flights (up to 500 miles) from the jet-port to STOL (short take-off and landing) aircraft, which would relieve much of the crowding at the main terminals. But VTOL and STOL systems would require construction of an entirely new network of facilities, in competition for attention and money with proposals for high-speed ground service.

Similar difficulties surround the prospects for much supersonic service in the next ten years. The Anglo-French supersonic transport, the Concorde, will, indeed, come onto the air lanes in the first half of the decade, perhaps as early as 1973. It's a highly uneconomic aircraft, however. Even though the British and French governments are picking up all the development costs, the plane will cost at least half again as much as a 747 (maybe twice as much), and will carry at most half as many passengers (maybe only a third as many). Even when the economies of speed are counted in--a plane that can make two round trips a day between New York and Paris obviously offers more seats per day than a plane that makes only one--airlines flying the Concorde will have to charge first-class fares to break even.

In theory, the American SST would be much more economical, and the arguments in favor of building it are not so foolish as its political opponents would have us believe. Aerospace is the nation's largest manufacturing industry, with 1,175,000 employees, and it's among our largest sources of foreign-trade revenues; 85 percent of all commercial aircraft in use in the Western world were made in America. The SST project is today our only large-scale project advancing this technology, and its abandonment would have ramifications that might be unacceptable if we knew them all.

And yet the sonic boom may turn out to be an inescapable physical constraint. (Boeing keeps somebody investigating ideas for its elimination--"as we keep somebody investigating anti-gravity, not because it's going to happen but because the payoff would be so big if it did.") There is no theory of a democratic society that says tens of millions should "learn to live with sonic boom" so that tens of thousands can get to their destinations a little sooner. And we don't know how much harm crisscrossing jet trails at the 65,000-foot level might do to what is an unusually stable layer of the atmosphere. Anyway, on a more practical level, the airlines are hard put to absorb the costs of the new 747s, DC-10s and L-1011s. Though they've put into SST almost $60,000,000 in deposits, which don't draw interest, the airlines aren't really as eager as they say. At best, even if everything stays on schedule, the Boeing SST isn't due until 1978; sometime in the Eighties--or never--looks like a better bet.

Indeed, a great increase in slow air travel is a more likely prospect. Two-engine private planes are already plying the Atlantic step by step through Labrador and Iceland, for the pleasure of their owner-fliers, and private flights to Bermuda and Nassau are commonplace. But there is a limit to how enthusiastic one should become in examining this possibility. The thought of limitless numbers of private planes crowding the air the way our private cars now crowd the land brings to mind Samuel Hoffenstein's querulous parody:

Breathes there a man with hide so tough Who says two sexes aren't enough?

For every reason, from personal safety to pollution control to national priorities, it is highly undesirable that people should feel they have a "right" to a private plane as they now have a "right" to a private automobile. Still, there will be enough airports in remote places to justify some expansion of pleasure flying, and those who are up in the air anyway will want to go somewhere interesting while they're about it. Most of the large new resorts and club facilities will maintain their own private airports for "general aviation."

For increasing numbers of Americans, travel is going to mean a home far away from home. Not many will be able to afford a house and land beside a golf course in Palm Springs, but the spread of condominium apartment houses (in Spain and Italy as well as in Miami Beach) means that a permanent base in remote climes has become a real possibility for the merely well to do. And there will be many, many more of those, in all countries.

What with clubs on the one hand and condominiums on the other, the future of leisure travel may look suspiciously like an anthill; and that danger does exist. The population explosion and the revolution of rising expectations are not just things you read about in books; you will have to live with them. But if you examine accounts of 18th Century travelers, when tourism first became fashionable, you'll find that the inns were crowded then--and filthy and dangerous, too. Grand, luxe is still available for those who want to pay the price; and there are still plenty of corners of the earth where the adventurous can find nobody who speaks their language or ever heard of flush toilets. For people who just want to relax, enjoy themselves and learn a little about the world, the Seventies will offer new convenience, decent comfort and a soupçon of excitement at prices they can afford. If that doesn't seem like enough, consider the possibility that under a different dispensation, you yourself might be among the multitudes who could never hope to find the time nor the money to travel. We shall have to learn to get along with one another while traveling, too. Come to think of it, what's so bad about that?