canyonwalker | 2024 Retrospective: 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 and one of the things I most enjoy in life. My travel for 2024 ran right up to within a few hours of the New Year... when I returned from a ~~great~~ both fun and frustrating trip to Panama in the evening on December 31.

Here are Five Things about my travel in 2024:

I traveled 94 days and 81 nights in 2024. At times this year I fretted I wasn't getting out enough, that I was traveling less than last year, but these overall figures just slightly edge out 2023's totals of 92/81. It's not at the level of the 115 days I traveled in 2019, the last full year pre-pandemic... though the difference is largely in work travel. More on that below.
Over 80% of my travel was leisure. That's up even from last year's 75% and is a huge shift from 10-15 years ago when job travel was the majority of my time away from home. 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 patterns have fundamentally changed. Business travel has only partly came back after Coronavirus. Trade shows are in full swing again. That's what most of my business travel this year involved. In-person visits to customers remain much slower than pre-pandemic. It's because people just don't work in the (same) office anymore. Despite widely publicized "RTO" (return to office) mandates, 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. Moreover, with highly distributed teams being the norm, us traveling to any one customer site for a meeting means there are almost always key people who need to join remotely from across the country— or halfway around the world. Thus most meetings are virtual by customer request.
I flew 54,559 miles in 2024. That's a step up from last year's 47,500 and the most since I've flown since 61k in 2017 though nowhere close to the 150k+/year I flew back in the late 00s/early 10s when I was a globe-trotting business traveler. Still, with most of this year's miles being leisure trips I'm content being slightly less of a globe trotter. Though as I shift into semi-retirement mode imminently I hope actually to do a bit more globe trotting— but now for leisure!
Bucket List items checked off: 3 🪣✔. In the past 12 months I made progress on all three of my travel bucket lists. One of them I completed: visiting all 50 states and DC. I finished that up with our trip to Alaska in June. While in Alaska I also visited one more US national park, Kenai Fjords National Park, upping my count to 53/63. And I visited two more foreign countries, New Zealand and Panama, bringing my tally to 23 countries.