With the travel season is just around the corner, everyone is making plans to escape from their hectic work life and packing their travel bags for their long-awaited vacations. Although going for vacation is the best escape plan ever, many of us are anticipating the travel journey with a quiver of dread because the thought of carrying all the overweight baggage, queuing the endless security lines and squeezing into the small airplane seats are just not the most exciting part of traveling.
Those kinds of experiences make it hard for us not to envy how the rich travel these days. Their getaways such as taking private jet planes to Caribbean Island villas are way above the travel standard of normal tourists.
Recently, on my last night in Thailand, I met up with some friends who had just spent their vacation staying in a five-star hotel on the outskirts of the city. To my amazement, my friends who are luxury travelers quizzed me about my comical but vivid excursions, which had left me both tiring and excited by the end of every single trip.
After the meet up, I began to realize that my friends suffered their own form of travel envy. The sense of control provided by their huge spending power had deadened their travel experience. The experiences with private hosts and staying in 5 star hotels did not create the memories that they could treasure and remember forever.
As the rich is shifting towards the experience-oriented traveling, they are more willing to fork out large amounts of money to acquire the travel experience they are hoping for. As an example, by the early of next year, wealthy travelers will be able to take a commercial space flight on Virgin Galactic, including a whole five minutes of weightlessness for US$200,000. With so many rich people showing interest in the space flight since its announcement, we are certain that the rich is going to great lengths to set themselves apart from others, as traveling is getting more and more common for most people.
Another proof of the shift is that wealthy travelers these days even plan for charity driven excursions to remote villages in countries like Madagascar and take a light aircraft to such villages just to shake hands with the Amazonian shamans.
As a result of the shift from luxury travel to peak life experience travel, travel planners will be creating their travel packages with the ultimate aim of creating a memorable experience for all the travelers. In the near future, I can assure that the most highly sought after vacations by the rich and the middle class will definitely be 5 star vacations that are charity driven or vacations that are able to offer the travelers with peak life experiences.
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