Is it true that many Americans will never visit another country

[cinaminvanilla]

I remember reading an article where it says that many Americans don't have a passport or leave the USA ever in their lives. Just wondering does anyone with knowledge know if this true. Because the US is so big I could imagine people never travelling to another country. I think I read that for those who visit other countries the two most popular countries for people who live in the US to visit aside from their own is Canada and Mexico.

If you look at America you can see there is hardly a reason to!

They have snow covered mountains for skiing rivalling the Alps. Beaches and sun as good as Bondi. Big city sophisticated living like New York. Deserts, architecture, indigenous peoples and areas that are now protected, New England, New Orleans, Las Vegas. Wild forests with bears, museums, art galleries, Disneyland, Chinatown and on and on. It's endless and huge.

If you look at England, you have inland and coastal and cities, grey drizzly weather most of the time. Not much else.

Admittedly not the history like other countries have, and there are spectacles like the pyramids, Eiffel Tower and Hampton court palace, but once you see those, you e seen them and it works out very expensive.

When did you get your passport Biddypop? 1980? Things have changed a bit since then.

I think they tend to go on road trips a lot. America is massive so for a lot of people they would just go on holiday to another part of the country. They have a lot less annual leave as well.

@katemuff

America is a continent comprising of the USA, Canada, Central and Southern America. It is incredibly diverse and even within just the USA there is such a vast range of culture, climate and landscape that you could very easily travel widely without ever leaving. Only 37% of US citizens currently have a valid passport compared to 75% of UK citizens but many Brits travel only for better weather and have no interest in other cultures. A great many European citizens never leave Europe - which is the equivalency. My Step Father is Texan and widely travelled, he finds it very odd how many British people look down their nose at US citizens and mock their lack of culture, gun laws and poor quality food. This attitude only betrays the ignorance of the person commenting on the incredibly rich diversity culture of the US and it seems that for middle class Brits, the last acceptable form of bigotry is towards Amercians.

It may simply be disgust at a country that feels so comfortable to make military and political decisions for places they have no knowledge of.

It may simply be disgust at a country that feels so comfortable to make military and political decisions for places they have no knowledge of.

And it may well be that a certain type of Brit has been raised to believe they are the best in the world at everything, and no-one else comes close - and they like to let lesser mortals know this.

And it may well be that a certain type of Brit has been raised to believe they are the best in the world at everything, and no-one else comes close - and they like to let lesser mortals know this.

Could be, although I'm not sure that being disgusted by the US is a purely British phenomenon.

America is huge and people (well the ones I know) have moved around so have family to visit (so if you have upped sticks from Florida to San Francisco, that’s one hell of a trip to visit granny when you only get 2 weeks annual leave).

I can believe it. There’s so much to do and even the weather in different states is so different that you could go state to state every year of your life and have a great time I’d say.

There are lots of posts on MN from UK based posters anxious about visiting London for the first time. Some people prefer not to travel/ can’t afford to travel/ have personal circumstances that make it difficult to travel. I am free to travel, can afford to travel but there are many places in the UK I haven’t been to, and even more places in Europe and the rest of the world I haven’t been to.

We're Brits living in the USA. We have plenty of vacation time. Aside from a small stratum of people in the sorts of jobs that pay big money for you to work 24/7, low vacation is typically an issue with poorly paid work--meaning they wouldn't have the money to go overseas even if they had the time.

With 5 people we just can't afford overseas holidays every year, and with travel time, a week is the bare minimum with 2 being better--that's a lot of hotel time to pay for. You really need to have quite a bit of income for that. Another problem for families is that our school calendar is arranged with most of the holiday time in summer. There's a week at Christmas and a week at Easter.

Climate and scenery matters a lot--how many Brits go abroad just for the beach? And a city break in Paris or Berlin would be the equivalent of going to NYC or Chicago. On the East Coast you do have people who go to the Caribbean for beach holidays (much closer than Hawaii!) but the USVI and Puerto Rico don't require passports, and Mexico is one of the popular destinations.

By the way if you want a historical site on the level of Macchu Picchu, visit Canyon de Chelly (inhabited for 5,000 years) or Mesa Verde. There's tropical rain forest in both Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Well I know quite a few brits who have no interest in travelling outside the UK. Weird in my opinion, but it isn’t only Americans.

www.thebalancecareers.com/paid-holiday-schedule-1917985

Although there are some employers giving a decent amount of paid holiday time, the overall picture is of very small amounts of annual leave.

That link is talking about holidaysChristmas, New Yearsand not vacation time. (It's not very clearly written.)

According to the BLS, the average American receives 10 days paid vacation per year NOT inclusive of paid holidays. My husband works for a federal contractor, and they observe all the federal holidays. When he worked for a different company, he only got 6 of the 10. (Now 11.)

When my sister changed jobs last time she wasn’t able to take any holidays in the first year 😳. But when I worked for a company with a 2-woman NY office - they took every single public holiday going (U.K., US plus all religious ones for religions that they weren’t affiliated with!)

@knitnerd90
Sorry, I’m confused. You said:

We're Brits living in the USA. We have plenty of vacation time. Aside from a small stratum of people in the sorts of jobs that pay big money for you to work 24/7, low vacation is typically an issue with poorly paid work

But then:

According to the BLS, the average American receives 10 days paid vacation per year NOT inclusive of paid holidays.

So which is it?

@MattyGroves

www.thebalancecareers.com/paid-holiday-schedule-1917985

Although there are some employers giving a decent amount of paid holiday time, the overall picture is of very small amounts of annual leave.

That article refers to the equivalent of British Bank holidays, not to vacation days. If you read the full article, it even names the days in question.

Ignorance is fed by seeing what we want to see.

[quote plodalong12]@knitnerd90
Sorry, I’m confused. You said:

We're Brits living in the USA. We have plenty of vacation time. Aside from a small stratum of people in the sorts of jobs that pay big money for you to work 24/7, low vacation is typically an issue with poorly paid work

But then:

According to the BLS, the average American receives 10 days paid vacation per year NOT inclusive of paid holidays.

So which is it?[/quote]
This is the quote I found on BLS

“ Over 3 in 4 civilian workers2 (77 percent) received paid holidays in March 2018, averaging 8 paid holidays per year.”

So the average of 8 would only be for the 77% who get paid holidays. The people with zero are excluded from the calculation because it wouldn’t be a meaningful number as to typical number of paid holidays if they were included.

@knitnerd90

That link is talking about holidaysChristmas, New Yearsand not vacation time. (It's not very clearly written.)

According to the BLS, the average American receives 10 days paid vacation per year NOT inclusive of paid holidays. My husband works for a federal contractor, and they observe all the federal holidays. When he worked for a different company, he only got 6 of the 10. (Now 11.)

You're right - sorry bad link - but as you say, it's overall not a lot of holiday that the average American gets. 10 days is under half of what the average British person gets. I have lots of American family and friends and even in good professional jobs, 10-12 days isn't unusual.

What that means is that longer haul travel is difficult for many as you want to do that for 2 weeks if possible. So there's more of a culture of long weekends. Some of my American east coast relatives have even done London as a long weekend! I think the culture impacts on even people who do have more holiday time as we're all influenced by what people are doing around us.

The key in the discussion of us vacation time is the stratification of the workforce. Professional, salaried employees often have generous benefits. Low wage hourly workers often simply don’t get paid at all when they don’t work, even if they miss work for illness. That isn’t a hard and fast rule, every company is different.

Much of work life in the US is divided this way. Access to paid holidays, decent health insurance, and retirement plans are all incentives offered to attract and retain employees, not entitlements. As a highly educated professional, I’ve had access to these perks from my first day of work. Some of the support staff at the same companies work for years to qualify for the same benefits.

"I think they tend to go on road trips a lot."

Part of the thinking in locating Disneyland on the edge of Paris was that people from UK & Germany would drive eight hours and more to get there for a one or two-night stay.

True.

Hence the ignorance.

If you removed people from the UK who only travel for warm holiday destinations (rather than cultural aspect of visiting say, Spain), I reckon you'd have far fewer people requiring passports here, too. If people in the USA want a hot beach, they can stay within their own borders easily.

Also as has been noted, they've far less holiday time than anywhere else. My first office job in the USA had no official holiday time for the first year (we did have 5 'sick days' which, if we didn't need them for actually being ill, we could finagle a bit of time off out of), and one week for the second year.

FWIW I think the statistics on passport ownership will rise now that it sounds as if (I don't live in the US anymore so I'm unsure) there's a requirement to use an official ID for any travel and/or voting etc, thus passport applications have risen.

@cinaminvanilla

I remember reading an article where it says that many Americans don't have a passport or leave the USA ever in their lives. Just wondering does anyone with knowledge know if this true. Because the US is so big I could imagine people never travelling to another country. I think I read that for those who visit other countries the two most popular countries for people who live in the US to visit aside from their own is Canada and Mexico.

I live in the US and I'd say that about 75% of the people I personally know here have never left the US.

There are many reasons. In the US, companies generally doesn't give much annual leave. There's no legal minimum. My job has what's considered 'good' time off and I get 13 days a year. Many places offer fewer than 10, and often you have to work for a company for a year or two before you get any.

The US is so different from coast to coast that going to a different state is almost like going to a different country in terms of weather, landscape etc. Most people do that.

People travel a lot less here than they do in the UK. They tend not to expect to have a holiday and when they do have time off it's usually spent at home.

The other thing is that the US is somewhat insular. Many people here believe that the US is the best country in the world and have zero interest in going anywhere else!

@plinkplinkfizzer

That seems really brutal *@RightYesButNo* .It must be terrifying to find yourself or a family member vulnerable with life changing illness or disabilities .

It’s heartbreakingly brutal. I worked for a non-profit hospice in the US for a short while, and there were plenty of people who were on hospice because they didn’t want to bankrupt their family by getting treatment for high grade cancer. If the options were one more year with their family, but they’d lose their house, they had to choose to die instead so their family wouldn’t lose the house (I met a man in this situation).

I saw someone in another thread say we’re taught to now treat stage 4 cancer as a chronic condition, not an instant death sentence. But in the US, it often is still an instant death sentence if you can’t afford the ongoing treatment to keep it a chronic condition, and most people can’t.

Americans don't get much time off work, sadly.

Those who do often buy a second/ holiday home and spend precious time off there.

I know a good few families with the equivalent of a Russian dacha by a lake or beach one state away. They can take off work early on Friday and return late Sunday, spend holidays like the Fourth of July, Labor Day, etc there. They also spend time there in winter, criss country skiing, snowmobiling, ice fishing.

Many Americans spend a year or half an academic year studying abroad,so all is not lost.

Then there are the thousands of Americans who get posted abroad with the armed forces. I know a lad currently in Afghanistan working with the airlift, who has spent three years on various European bases, enjoying life to the fullest.