Traveling and Its Meaning

Travel is basically the movement of human beings between different geographic locations. Travel can be done by car, bicycle, foot, plane, train, bus, boat, sea or any other mode, and is one way or another repeated between different locations. The word ‘travel’ can have many variations, depending on who you are talking to, or what you mean when you use it. For example: I’m just going on an extended vacation, I’ve been to Paris many times, I’m on a cruise ship, I’m a traveler in question.

When we talk about travel, we could either talk about travelling within a country, or travelling to another country. If you want to go travelling for business purposes, then your travel plans would probably be more routine than those of a leisurely traveler. And when you talk about a leisurely traveller, you’re talking about travelling around the world, not just within your own country. Let’s take each of these forms of travel separately, and look at what they might mean to someone who is travelling. When talking about a tourist, we could say that he/she is a person travelling to see different sights. It doesn’t really matter what the sight is, as long as the person wants to see it.

A holiday maker, on the other hand, is someone going on a one place trip. A short vacation, or even a vacation in a region where they’ve never been before could be termed a journey. On a single place travel trip, there is usually only one destination – the destination may be a city, state, country or globally, a location that you’ve never visited before. The journey is therefore quite continuous, even if it goes through various countries or regions. Thus the term continuous travel.

So we can now define travel meaning for the purposes of understanding travel in general, and also in the context of a one-person-one-place type of travel. We shall use the word journey to mean a continuous journey. Let’s look at the other ways in which we would normally describe a travel experience.

For example, when people travel by air, they are on a one-way journey. But when people travel by sea, they are on two-way journeys. In any case, when people travel by land, they are on a three-way journey – a one-to-one journey, a two-to-one journey and a one-to-three-way journey. All these types of travel are, therefore, just types of journeys.

So let us look at how we can redefine travel meaning so that it makes more sense. Let us look at the different forms of travelling. Each of these has its own travel meaning, and they have to do with the environment in which the traveller is travelling to and from. This knowledge will help us redefine travel, not least in light of the current global travel problems we face.