Do Americans really hate to travel?

If you wonder why less than one-third of US adults have passports — compared to more than two-thirds in the UK — you might also wonder: Why don’t Americans travel more? Traveling overseas, that is.
 

That number is just too low for an affluent country such as the US, believes Bruce Bommarito, ceo of the US Travel Association. His explanation is simple:
 

"Americans are comfortable in their own environment."
 

But is it really that simple. And does it matter?
 

Oversea trips are down by three percent last year compared to 2008, according to the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries.
 

"Not taking the leap is comforting, because this is the American life," Matthew Kepnes, international traveler and creator of NomadicMatt.com, told CNN News. "Breaking outside anything that is your norm is scary."
 

Tourism experts and avid travelers attribute Americans’ lack of interest in international travel to a few key factors, including:
 

—The United States’ own rich cultural and geographic diversity.
 

—An American skepticism and/or ignorance about international destinations.
 

—A work culture that prevents Americans from taking long vacations abroad.
 

—The prohibitive cost and logistics of going overseas.
 

"In the United States, we have an enormous amount of places we can travel — basically an entire continent," said author Gary Arndt, who has been traveling abroad and blogging since 2007. "You can do all kinds of things without needing a passport."
 

Arndt said he could go to any number of different ethnic enclaves within large American cities and get a taste of culture without spending much money or time.
 

World traveler and writer Kepnes says response to his article on why American’s don’t travel had a record response. He blamed geography and cost on the fact that perhaps only 10 percent of Americans travel overseas.
 

“Many people countered my argument by saying that geography and cost were big factors but if cost and geography played a role in determining where you traveled, no one would ever travel,” he wrote.
 

He concluded: “The reasons why Americans don’t travel overseas can be mostly explained by one thing: cultural ignorance.” By that, he did not mean Americans are stupid, but that they are ignorant of the world outside their own country, and don’t have much interest in other places.

They don’t want to know more about the rest of the world. And the news media does not help because coverage of foreign news gets less and less attention.
 

When media do report on foreign destinations, it’s often bad news. "Every time I say I’m going somewhere, people assume that it’s dirty, they don’t have good hospitals, you’re going to get sick or raped or robbed," Arndt said. "If you know something about Colombia, it’s drug lords, which hasn’t been a problem for 20 years, but that’s still what people think of."
 

Kepnes thinks geography also plays a role in why Americans don’t travel overseas.
 

“It’s not that America’s size makes travel prohibitive, its size is important because people feel there is no reason to leave. We don’t need to travel to ‘big scary places’ when we have deserts, tropical islands, mountains, endless summer, wilderness, snow, and more,” he writes.
 

In other words, travelers don’t have to leave the US to “find everything you want here.”
 

He does not think that is a positive trait because in a shrinking and threatening outside world, Americans are perhaps ducking knowledge of other cultures and countries.
 

So does it matter? Almost everyone agrees that travel is good and that it’s a positive to see how others live.
 

Kepnes says he doesn’t know whether American travel will pick up in the future.
 

“But I do know that right now, Americans still aren’t traveling overseas. And, sadly, that won’t change any time soon,” he concludes.
 

By David Wilkening