> Anyone remember spending hours at AAA getting TripTiks

I'm glad to see someone else mention TripTiks. I went on long road trips with my family when I was a kid and TripTiks were the coolest thing. A TripTik was a custom-made flip-book assembled from pages that were map segments with everything of interest noted along the way. Your route was marked with a highlighter. It was bit like turn-by-turn guidance in handheld paper form.

>> People lived in 1990 and didn't feel that bad to have to call a travel agency to get a ticket

Travel agencies were awful; people don't realize how good they have it with online tickets. The way they worked is you'd ask for a flight from X to Y. They'd spend a whole minute typing some cryptic database query into their terminal and come up $1000 leaving at 6:45 am. You'd ask if there's a better price and they'd spend another minute typing a slightly different query before coming up with something slightly better. Repeat for 10 minutes, and you feel guilty every time you ask a question because they're doing you a favor with so much typing. Then ask if there's anything better if you leave Wednesday and the whole process repeats. Finally they obtain a semi-decent flight after a huge effort, but you're left with the feeling that you probably could have saved a bunch more if you'd known the right question to ask.

Even the improvements over the last 15 years have been immense. Remember using printed directions from Mapquest?

These wouldn't have been so bad if they were accurate. More than once I'd have to drive across multiple states to somewhere that wasn't a giant metropolis, and it would take me through a random field and tell me to turn left at a street that definitely did not exist.

I remember doing pretty good with a decent map book. I'm not sure traveling these days is really that much simpler. I did some pretty big trips before the age of always on and it worked just fine. Also me and my wife still argue navigation in the Tesla with its futuristic built-in navigation (that's not always perfect). My "reliable" not-80's Subaru Outback broke down on me in my last big road trip (which indirectly led to getting the Tesla, so far so good).

Not to knock down all the real progress, but things were fine 20+ years ago as well...

> I'm not sure traveling these days is really that much simpler.

I arrive in a foreign country.

My phone works as soon as I turn it off airplane mode.

I already have lodging, which didn't involve any long-distance calling or navigating foreign accents over a scratchy submarine cable.

I don't know how to get there. Is public transit an option? One short map query later, I determine that it is, but that would involve more hauling luggage than I'd like, besides, that 20 minute wait for the bus at the end looks dodgy.

Rideshare it is. They pick me up at the airport and I get where I'm going.

vs.

I arrive in a foreign country. I have the Lonely Planet guide. I circled a hotel that sounds good. A hawker comes up to me and hassles me about staying at their hotel instead; I pass.

The guide has some instructions for how to take public transit, but it doesn't sound easy, and I don't speak the language.

First, I convert some currency, and get enough change to make a local call, and call the hotel. I think I just got a reservation? I definitely have enough left over to pay for a taxi, so down to the taxi stand it is.

The first few taxi hawkers strike me as excessively aggressive, eventually I find someone calmer. Time to negotiate a rate; Lonely Planet helpfully informs me that it's one of those countries where this is how it works. Once that's done, I get my ride to the destination, and the cabbie asks for twice what we agreed on. I calmly insist on the original price, which he agrees to after a couple passes; I tip anyway, because I'm an American.

Now I'm at the hotel. I'm in luck! I either do have a reservation, or the room and price that I agreed on over the phone is the same as it was then. Not like last time...

Yes. Traveling these days is really that much simpler.

> Traveling these days is really that much simpler.

Maybe, but I'm not totally convinced the "simplicity" has really made my life any better?

I have personal experience of travelling both pre and post smartphone era. I've spent reasonable or large amounts of time in San Francisco, New York, London, Bangkok, and Singapore (from Sydney), and a day or a few days in many more places. None of the "pre smart phone era" travel I did was onerously difficult without a smartphone, and I don't seem to have started doing additional travel since smartphones "slowed" all those problems you list.

I was comfortable enough travelling using taxis, printed maps, travellers cheques, and travel agents. I would happily enough fall back on those (well, these days I take advantage of credit card/maestro ATM availability and don't even know if travellers cheques are still a thing.) I will admit the stress levels travelling in Thailand, where I don't speak the language or even read the alphabet, are lower with a globally networked supercomputer in my pocket, but I never avoided going there (or anywhere else) because "It's too hard".

(And given current climate, I'm quite likely to arrive in the US next time I visit without a phone, or perhaps with a minimal burner. Sure, my phone makes a bunch of stuff "simpler", but it also carries a fuckton of intimate personal information, and it makes for a very tempting target for badly behaved or overly invasive border control staff...)

> I have personal experience of travelling both pre and post smartphone era.

Neither of those stories were made up...

Never argued that it's better, only that it's simpler.

Hard to tell if it's better since I'm older now. You only get to be a twentysomething on his first trip to Asia once.

Heh. that's all the fun in traveling... Even in the good olden days a travel agent would book you accommodations no problem. You'd book a car if you wanted one. I've done lots of trips without being online ... the world was aligned to support that.

I did spent a little bit of time in SFO trying to figure out where the rideshare pickup area was last time I was there, more time than I spent finding the train the previous time... But it did get me exactly where I wanted to go which was nice...

There are still plenty of places where the phone doesn't really give you much today. Lots of places without ride sharing...