canyonwalker | 2023 Travel Wrap-up: Oh, The Places I Went! (Reply)

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel for 2023 ran right up to within 12 hours of the New Year... when I returned from a phenomenal trip to Australia on midday December 31.

Here are Five Things about my travel in 2023:

I traveled 92 days and 81 nights in 2023. That splits out as 22 days/17 nights business travel and 70 days/64 nights leisure travel. Overall these figures are up about 15% over my stats from 2022 and much higher than the pandemic years of 2020-2021. I'm not quite back to recent pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, for example, I logged 115 days and 103 nights of travel. And even those figures are well below my gonzo days of travel in the late 00s/early 10s.

It's satisfying that leisure is 75% of my travel. That's a turnaround from 10-15 years ago when leisure was less than half, sometimes as little as one-third of my travel. The shift in the ratio is due partly to fewer business trips and partly to making more leisure trips. There's a big element of intentionality in the latter; we've got to plan to spend time traveling. And generally we do, though not always as much as we'd like. For example, we didn't travel as much in the summer this past year as we usually do. It's not just that there was no big trip but there weren't even many weekend getaways. Partly that was due to weather patterns but also partly it was due to us being less aggressive about making trips happen for a few months.

Business travel's "New Normal" after Coronavirus. Business travel has partly come back after Coronavirus. Trade shows are all in full swing again. That's what most of my business travel this year involved. In-person visits to customers remain much slower than before. That's not due to Coronavirus restrictions on workplace visitors anymore (it was in 2021 & 2022) but due to the greater shift to remote work. Widely publicized "RTO" (return to office) mandates notwithstanding, the kinds of customers I call on work in-office maybe one day a week. They prefer not to make a special trip into the office just to meet a vendor when they feel they can get everything they need in a videoconference. Plus, the trend of distributed teams continues to grow. Workers can't come in to the (same) office when the company hired them across multiple states and countries.

I flew 47,500 miles in 2023. That's a step up from the past few years when Coronavirus put the kibosh on a lot of flying. I flew 11k in 2020 (all in Jan/Feb), 21k in 2021, and 32k last year. 2023's tally represents a return to my recent pre-pandemic average of 50k miles/year. Though 2023 would have been a lot like 2022 if we didn't come up with the idea of traveling to Australia late in the year. And even this amount is nothing like the 150k+/year I flew back in the late 00s/early 10s when I was a globe-trotting business traveler.

Bucket List items checked off: 3 🪣✔. After making a miserable zero progress on my bucket lists in 2022 I made progress on three (all three?) in 2023. I visited one more state, Mississippi, bringing my list to 50/51. I visited one more US national park, New River Gorge in West Virginia, upping my count to 52/63. And I visited two more foreign countries, Cayman Islands and Australia, bringing my tally to 21 countries.