History of the Holiday

If you took a traveller from Ancient Rome and set them in 21st century Europe, most of life would look and feel completely alien. Our tech would bewilder them, as would the diversity of countries and ways of life.

But, they may take comfort in knowing that the holiday – an idea they first pioneered – is still going strong. The Romans were the first civilization to indulge in what we’d now consider travelling for pleasure. But, rather than the one to two weeks we manage to get away for, wealthy Romans would look to get away for a staggering two years!

Tony Perrottet - author, historian and traveller - explained that the Romans were the first nation to travel because foreign holidays required a period of peace and prosperity. The Roman Empire was the first civilization to enjoy such a period and put the infrastructure in place to allow for holidays to happen.

The work of the army and navy in securing borders and transport against banditry, along with the ever expanding borders of the empire, gave citizens freedom to travel without ever technically leaving Rome’s jurisdiction. This freedom led to the establishment of inns, restaurants and tour guides, everything a budding traveller would need to enjoy their trips.

The Romans even had guidebooks, with Pausanias' Description of Greece setting the standard for what a travel guide could look like. It’s a classic of its kind, providing insights on everything from the geography of Greece through to religious art and architecture via a detour into the details of an ancient ritual.

But, it came in 10 parts and without Kindles, it was more of a shelf filler than something to idly flick through in the Forum as you planned your day. Unless of course, you had a servant or two to lug the different volumes around for you.

With the Fall of Rome and the ascent of the Dark Ages, the holiday as we know it took a break of its own. Travel throughout the Dark Ages and for much of the medieval period happened for one of two reasons – finding new land to call your own or raiding the lands of your enemies.

The first image to come to mind when most of us think about the Dark Ages is probably of Viking raiders – hardly something that would encourage people to venture beyond their own front door.

This constant threat of battle, combined with unsafe travel routes meant that for most people across Europe, the furthest they ever travelled was to their neighbouring village to celebrate the occasional wedding or holy day.

The exception, (and there’s always an exception) was people who felt a religious calling to embark on a pilgrimage. Such travellers were brilliantly satirised by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, but in reality there were highly structured foundations allowing the medieval pilgrim to tread ancient paths.

The south of Italy acted as a bridge between two of the key pillars of Christian Europe – Rome and Jerusalem – and there was a whole network of inns, traders and monasteries which provided all the support a pilgrim could ever ask for. More ambitious travellers could cover most of Europe on their pilgrimage, as illustrated by Matthew Paris’s 13th century masterpiece - Map Of The Itinerary From London To Jerusalem.

If you weren’t up for the life of a pilgrim, but still wanted to travel, your best bet was to become part of a merchant’s convoy. The name Marco Polo may be more familiar to most of us as a swimming pool game, but his fame comes from his epic 24 year long trip, documented in The Travels of Marco Polo. We’d find most of his tales remarkable today, but for his contemporaries, it was his description of how people across China used paper to denote currency that was most shocking. Most of Europe used coins minted from metal and this use of paper was unheard of.

“Wheresoever a person may go throughout the Great Kaan’s [Kublai Khan] dominions he shall find these pieces of paper current, and shall be able to transact all sales and purchases of goods by means of them just as well as if they were coins of pure gold” – Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo

What’s apparent from these different travels is just how long they all took. Without access to anything more sophisticated than a horse or a boat, foreign travel was a lengthy undertaking. And, as with most luxuries from this period, travelling for pleasure was restricted to a tiny minority – those wealthy enough to go without work, but also without any significant responsibilities to discharge in their home towns.

If you were one of these lucky few, then medieval travel would open your eyes to a whole new world. If not, your journeys were probably limited to the occasional trip down the road to celebrate a Saint’s day or the wedding of a family member.

In the 18th century, artists and aristocrats revived the Roman tradition of taking a Grand Tour of Europe. On one such tour, Mary Shelley wrote her famous novel Frankenstein. It is believed that her experiences in Germany and Switzerland inspired much of the story.

Despite being 1500 years more advanced, travel was now more difficult. The old Roman roads had faded away, which made the land harder to navigate and more dangerous to traverse. Those privileged few on a Grand Tour would tend to hop from relative to acquaintance to passing introduction as they searched for places to stay.

This network of acquaintances also underpinned something equally crucial – getting your hands on foreign currency. Tony Perrottet explained that this was done in two ways. The first, and simpler way was carrying your own strongbox of cash, but this was risky and would only get you so far.

The second, more practical way involved carrying letters of introduction. Renaissance travellers would take these letters to the local consulates and be given local currency on the promise of a payment being made back home in their own currency. These letters were travellers’ lifeblood – without them you were reliant on good will and the cash you could carry with you.

Luckily for everyone else, the industrial revolution saw the rise of the steam train, which enabled the common Victorian to up sticks and travel to new locations. With the introduction of the bank holiday in 1871, people jumped aboard these trains to spend the three-day break by the sea, and so the long weekend, shorter holiday as we know it today was born.

Donkey rides and sandcastle building quickly became popular, with seaside towns benefiting from the new volume of holidaymakers. Piers popped up along coastlines, and ice cream vendors began to enjoy a roaring trade. Marionette puppets Punch and Judy settled into the seaside scene, with shows attracting huge crowds on the newly fashionable piers. During this period, the Victorians made their name in history as the inventors of the Great British seaside holiday.

Ice cream, fish and chips and piers are all components of the holidays that we still enjoy today, but there were some holiday traditions that lived and died in this era. Famous for their modesty, the Victorians remained covered from head to toe in loose fitting clothing– even whilst on the beach.

Horse-drawn contraptions called bathing machines provided the upper classes with a changing room in which they could slip into their bathing suit whilst travelling from sand to sea. Once at the water’s edge, they jumped quickly into the water so as not to be seen by other beach goers. When they wished to return to their deck chairs, they simply hopped back inside to dry off and change back into their clothes. Some bathing machines even had a “dipper”, whose delightful job it was to wait at the shore and push people into the sea. The dipper would then drag people back into their bathing machine once they had finished swimming.

It was not only the very wealthy who enjoyed trips to the seaside in this era. Blackpool and Southend-on-sea became especially popular with the working classes, with newly built pleasure palaces offering entertainment to visitors. The entertainment included music, dancing, theatre performances, aquariums and zoos. For many, their retreats to the seaside gave them a glimpse of life as they had never seen it before.

For the wealthy, holidays were not limited to the seaside. Steamboats allowed travellers to visit different continents and explore new lands.

Photographs taken from this era show wealthy tourists climbing the pyramids in Cairo (before this activity was outlawed), riding zebras and posing with native African tribes. For those travelling abroad, guidebooks were published with useful tips for exploring unknown countries and cultures. In L.C Davidson’s book entitled “Hints to Lady Travellers”, women were given advice on correct cycling attire, tipping abroad, drinking tea in foreign countries and choosing a suitably positioned deck chair aboard a cruise ship.

The most popular foreign holiday destinations in this period were Niagara Falls, Cairo, Oslo, Shanghai and Paris. Foreign hotels welcomed tourists, and travel operators began to set up systems by which tourists could pay for hotels with hotel coupons. Travellers could also obtain local currency using a “circular note”.

These were a practical method for banks with foreign branches to provide a rudimentary currency exchange service. Individuals would pay the bank in their local currency and receive a note promising that value of currency in return. These notes could then be cashed in their destination currency.

Over time, the concept of the circular note would evolve into the Travellers Cheque, something most of us are familiar with today.

Just getting into other countries was a mission in its own right. There was no passport control and crossing borders was notoriously difficult. Travellers and their luggage were frequently searched, and countries placed high taxes on the import of luxury items such as tobacco. Smuggling became a popular way to sneak luxury goods into countries, and many travellers took to bribing customs officers.

The Industrial revolution did open up new means of travel – the Orient Express ferried people across Eurasia, while the steamboat opened up sea travel to the masses. Of course, these journeys still took a lifetime compared to the plane rides we enjoy today – a steamboat crossing from London to New York took an endurance testing nine days.

But, such journeys were iconic and the launch of a new ship would be front page news. We remember the Titanic today as a disaster, but the initial launch was greeted with a wave of optimism. Such travel was an example of all that was great about human progress.

In 1903, the Wright brothers’ pioneering work on the concept of the aeroplane would pave the way for a breakthrough that would change the way the world experienced travel, forever.

The early 1920s saw the rise of entrepreneurial employers such as Henry Ford, who provided higher wages that enabled more people to travel for leisure.

Thanks to mass production, automobiles were now affordable and could be purchased by those other than just the very rich. The automobile quickly became the favourite mode of transport for holidaymakers, because it was cheap and provided more freedom than steam trains.

For mass travel, trains and boats were still the most widely used mode of transport, with more and more people beginning to explore more exotic, foreign nations. This saw the rise of the suntan, and bronzed skin became a sign of status and something that was envied.

Towards the end of the 1920s, air travel was advancing at a great pace. Although aeroplanes were at this point used mainly for mail delivery, people were beginning to imagine the ease and speed of holiday travel by air.

In 1928, a German airship named Graf Zeppelin carried 20 passengers and 43 crew members in the first ever commercial flight. In September the following year, Graf Zeppelin landed its first round-the-world flight.

Wealthy New Yorkers meanwhile, would adopt the old Tudor habit of vacating the city for the summer. These excursions are where our use of the word vacation to describe a holiday come from. People would literally vacate Manhattan for the summer, enjoying the kind of trip to Long Island or the Hamptons we see celebrities take today.

Why do holidays capture our imagination, and why are we so obsessed with creating new experiences for ourselves? The answer is that it’s in our nature. Our history is one of pioneering, of uncovering new frontiers and asking ourselves what’s next. It’s why in 2016, we’re sat asking ourselves what future holidays will look like.

What’s next is what drove us to explore new horizons, to see what was on the far side of the ridge and to venture beyond the confines of our planet. We don’t ask that because we’re dissatisfied with what we can do today. We ask because it’s human nature to be constantly exploring and asking what comes next. And for travel, the obvious next is space.

Space travel has always captured our imagination. We dream of visiting the moon and beyond. But, for the first time in human history we’re now seeing serious effort being put in to creating actual colonies in space. That effort is coming from Elon Musk and his Space X project. Musk has a stated goal of helping humanity create a sustainable living environment on Mars, but sadly, he doubts he’ll be alive to see it.

However, for our grandchildren and their children, the prospect of holidaying on Mars is a very real possibility. More than that, it’s something which actively excites our imaginations – 51% of brits said they expected holidays in space to be common by 2116.

In the meantime, a short trip to space is becoming an option – even if only for the very wealthy. But, as we’ve seen throughout our deep-dive into the history of the holiday, what starts as a luxury for the wealthy almost always becomes accessible to the rest of us one day. 700 people have already signed up to fly into space with Virgin Galactic, and they will surely be the first of many.

For people who can’t wait that long, what do holidays of the next 10-15 years hold? We’re likely to see improvements in the form of technology, with a report by Skyscanner suggesting that in 2024 we’ll no longer interact with humans when we arrive at a hotel. Instead our hotel rooms will be fully digital, where even our pillows will contain electronic features to wake us up in the morning.

The deep seas will also become open to us as a travel location. There’s so much to see and experience down there, some will question why we’d ever want to go to space? Why go and see blackness, when you can see the wonders of the deep seas.

It’s impossible to consider how we’ll holiday in the future without considering the impact of consumer friendly virtual reality devices.

Who wouldn’t want to check out their Tenerife villa, New Forest yurt or Caribbean cruise liner before handing over the deposit?

And, by integrating the latest reviews into the virtual experience you can peruse each element of, say, a cruise ship and get not only a visual sense of the magnificent dining room but a factual sense as to whether the service is Raymond Blanc or Basil Fawlty.

Marriott hotels are already offering virtual reality services to their clients and we’ll see more and more chains offer the same in the future. Tools like the Oculus Rift make virtual reality something all of us can enjoy, rather than a hobby for the techy few.

We may never be able to travel back in time, but through our future trips we’ll capture the spirit of exploration that drove our ancestors to travel.

Whether we’re plumbing new depths or ice-skating on Mars, the holiday will continue to capture our imaginations. We’ll continue to push the boundaries of our own experiences, striving to achieve those perfect moments we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.