The ‘darker side’ of travel gets overlooked, study says
American Airlines flights out of Los Angeles International Airport are cancelled due to a storm on the East Coast in January, 2015. A university study says that the drawbacks of regular travel, such as anxiety, stress and illness, are often ignored.
A university study out of Britain has confirmed what many business travelers already know: Regular travel can be a big bummer.
The study, titled “A Darker Side of Hypermobility,” says that society glamorizes travel but ignores the physical and psychological drawbacks. The negative aspects include the risk of deep-vein thrombosis, jet lag, exposure to radiation on commercial jets, anxiety about getting robbed or being the victim of terrorism and the stress on spouses left behind.
“In more extreme cases, mobility can engender psychological disorders and mental illness,” according to the study by the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey.
The study doesn’t advocate putting an end to travel. Instead, it says travelers might stay closer to home if they understood the true “darker side” of travel.
To read more about travel, tourism and the airline industry, follow me on Twitter at @hugomartin.
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