@Ilovemaisie
IamTomHanks ah to me that doesn't make me think 'travel' - that's just having a job in another country !!
Plus when you only have half a dozen not great GCSEs getting a job abroad really isnt that simple. Sorry but this obsession with 'travel' could be quite overwhelming and demotivating for a lot of people age 19/20. For most it simply isn't an easy opportunity. The cost of getting a passport is difficult for many.
Well, what do you mean by 'travel' -- are you thinking of lying on a beach in the Seychelles or something, or spending a year backpacking with copious funds?
That is probably out of the range of many young people, yes, but it's ridiculous to say that other methods of travelling aren't.
A UK passport currently costs £75.50 that is not an impossible sum to save. I saved up for mine no one in my family had ever had a passport -- from a PT job while I was still at school, and the first time I left the country was as an au pair to a family in the South of France, with not-great school French, just after I sat my final school exams. That was just for a summer to replace their au pair who'd had to leave early, and while it required stuff of me I'd never before had to draw on, as I was a timid, working-class teenager who'd barely left my home city, it was a wonderful time, and as I had almost no expenses, I saved enough money to travel around part of Italy by train, sleeping in hostels, at the end of the summer. This required no qualifications other than buying a passport and joining some au pair link agency which cost about a tenner.
Then I spent my first summer after starting university in Paris -- I just showed up, slept in a hostel for a few nights and got a job off the noticeboard at the American Church (pre-internet) that included accommodation in a convent, and got another PT job in a bureau de change. I made some good friends that summer, and had a blast.
The next summer I saved up and went to the US with friends on a J1 summer work visa which allowed me to work in the US and also covered a flight and cost a few hundred pounds which I'd saved from PT work throughout the year and we all worked three jobs and had saved enough money to travel around the US for a few weeks at the end.
The summer after that four of us bought an Interrail ticket and busked (with varying success) around Europe -- that was on a tiny budget, as we'd all just done Finals and had stopped working PT, and was quite squalid at times, and we came home thinner than we'd set out, but fabulous. And then spent the rest of the summer working in a London hotel (I'm not from the UK). That was the summer I turned 21.
Other than the J1, which was only open to students and cost a few hundred pounds (in part because flights were far more expensive back then), none of that required more than a passport and scraping together the cost of a flight or ferry, and an average amount of gumption. I wasn't any kind of special teenager - I'd barely left my home county, we were poor, and no one in my family had ever left the country (or gone to university), and I wasn't confident or extrovert -- but I knew there was more to life than what I'd seen.
The internet now makes it way easier to research cheap ways of going abroad, volunteering or working etc.