Commercial air travel made international vacations more commonplace.

This interactive timeline covers the first 100 years of passenger air travel, which was created in 1925 when the U.S. Post Office allowed private airlines to start delivering mail.

A 2024 study from Expedia Group found that two-thirds of tourists said movies and TV influence where and how they travel.

After World War II, the US dominated aviation, particularly Boeing. To compete, Europe's major industrial nations pooled resources to form Airbus, a customer-centric airplane manufacturer. Its A320 family of planes became the most popular in airliner history, leading to profitability in the 1990s. Amid Boeing's major hurdles in recent years, Airbus remains the industry leader.

On that day, American businessman Dennis Tito became the first paying passenger to visit space, spending a week aboard the International Space Station. Since then, space participants have been members of suborbital flights, which do not require intensive training to prepare for.

The city’s boardwalk, filled with amusement parks and vendors, became a significant attraction for vacationing families. The town also became a hub for entertainment, with actors often starting there before heading to Broadway.

It had significant impacts on just about every industry, including finance. Specifically, the transatlantic cable made it so that real-time financial transactions could take place across the Atlantic, and allowed for much faster sharing of information that increased global market accuracy.

In the 1970s, Rockwell International, a NASA contractor, and others investigated manufacturing passenger modules that could fit into the Space Shuttle's payload bay. NASA also opened spaceflights to nongovernment professionals, but many such programs were ended after the Challenger disaster, which killed the first Teacher in Space participant.

Long before Rick Steves or Lonely Planet, Thomas Cook’s “Travellers Handbooks” offered maps, recommendations, and tips for 19th-century tourists in unfamiliar locations.

Many travelers have shared their attachment to the documents as their utility fades. This sharply illustrated timeline reviews the development of the paper boarding pass as technology evolved.

Though astronaut has been used to describe any crew member in space, civilian explorers who lack formal training have instead been dubbed "space travelers" by some. The term astronaut may one day fall out of use or be modified by ongoing media and social perceptions as the space tourism industry continues to evolve.

Technologies developed for space exploration produced lasting spinoff innovations—from camera phones to memory foam—displaying how the space race reshaped everyday life here on Earth

In 1939, Clara Adams set the world record for the fastest person to circle the globe via commercial airliner, though she was a passenger and not a pilot. This article explores the impact of Adams' journey on the commercial flight industry. During...

During the medieval commercial revolution, money gradually replaced land as the primary economic commodity. Expanding trade, markets, and finance transformed Europe’s economy—laying foundations, historians argue, that were essential for the later Industrial Revolution.

The rise of televised games in the mid-20th century expanded college football’s reach far beyond campus stadiums—turning regional rivalries into national events, boosting revenue, and cementing the sport as a Saturday tradition across the country.

This visual guide jumps over the dawn of modern air travel and begins with the open-cockpit biplane flown by the first scheduled airline, the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line.

Four airlines dominate the US commercial airline industry: Delta, United, Southwest, and American. Many of these large companies secured their top spots in the industry via a series of mergers and acquisitions starting in the 1970s, when American acquired Trans Caribbean Airlines.

The prototypical middle-class American family vacation has been a staple for decades. But in the last 10 years, the cost—over $5K for a 5-night stay for a family of four—has placed the trip out of reach for many.

This podcast episode argues that airport luggage stores exist due, in part, to the security measures implemented after 9/11, creating capitve audiences of travelers. Some argue that airport luggage store shoppers coming from places where luggage is more expensive could be purchasing luggage in international airports. Specifically, the episode traces airport history from the very beginning to today's luggage store in your local Terminal B.

Barcelona wasn’t always a global tourist hotspot. Before hosting the 1992 Olympics, the city’s coastline was blocked by factories, green spaces were scarce, and tourism was minimal. But after securing the Olympic games, everything changed.

Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Gettysburg, and more have all become tourist destinations, despite the horrible events that have occurred at the sites. The phenomenon is sometimes called "dark tourism," a trend that seems to be spurred by interest in history, morbid curiosity, and popular culture (like HBO's series "Chernobyl").

Historian Elizabeth Nelson notes that companies sought "to turn holidays into opportunities for selling things from candy to flowers to magazine advertisements" in the 1900s. Hallmark, founded in 1911, pushed the holiday toward elementary students, who aimed to collect cards from as many classmates as possible.

Combining science, diplomacy, and logistics, the Corps of Discovery created a model for later expeditions—from charting the Arctic to NASA’s space missions.

In an era of 24-hour news, it can feel as if the world is on a perpetual downward spiral. This set of visualizations zoom out, and show how global living conditions have improved in recent centuries. The percentage of people living in extreme...

Since 1950, world trade values have grown nearly 410 times, mainly due to the successive tariff reductions negotiated under GATT and the WTO.

More than 93,000 cards were issued between 1968 and 1971, creating a waitlist that began when Gerhard Pistor, an Austrian journalist, visited a Viennese travel agency to request a flight to the moon. The cards were issued at no cost and numbered in the order they were issued.

As the peak solar cycle approached from late 2024 to early 2026, airlines serving countries such as Iceland, Finland, and Canada increased their scheduled flights, with direct flights to Tromsø, Norway, doubling since 2018. The northern lights tourism market has grown about 10% per year and is expected to increase from $941.9M in 2024 to $1.648B in 2030.

As the internet and email became more popular in the 1990s, more infrastructure that would eventually support remote work was created. But the practice was still relatively uncommon until the COVID-19 pandemic, when white-collar workers first took to working from home en masse.

The original American Express charge card was made of purple paperboard and allowed customers to book travel. Unlike credit cards, the card's balance had to be entirely paid off each month. When the card first launched, 250,000 customers used it, and 17,500 companies had agreed to accept it.

Some in the airport industry argue that charging street prices in airport restaurants isn't sustainable because it's more expensive to run a business inside an airport.

Still reeling from the Great Depression, many Americans were looking for low-cost (or free) activities. Some travel agencies curated "mystery hikes," which offered intrepid amblers the opportunity to be set on a blind adventure.

Devastating diseases like smallpox, influenza, measles, and other viruses were largely introduced into the Western Hemisphere beginning with the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus and the ensuing age of exploration.