Fast Travel vs Slow Travel: A Tale of Two Speeds

Thirty years of travel have taught me more than any guidebook ever could, particularly the difference between visiting a place versus truly understanding it. Most guidebooks read as if they were written from the same template. Their pages revolve around efficiency—how to compress a place into an itinerary, how to master it through speed rather than understanding. They break cities into must-see sights, train schedules, and walking routes designed to help you “make the most” of limited time on your vacation. In practice, they promote a type of vacation known as Fast Travel—an approach built on momentum. One more landmark. One more neighborhood. One more train ride squeezed into an already overstuffed itinerary. Before long, you’re spending more money and time on logistics and transit than actually experiencing the place you came to see.

Slow Travel is often described as the opposite of Fast Travel, but that’s not quite right. True slow travel isn’t about doing nothing—it’s about doing less, with intention. A week at an all‑inclusive beach resort, for example, is its own category. It’s therapeutic, almost a form of vacation rehab for people who are completely burned out. There’s a time and place for that kind of trip, especially if your goal is simply to unwind. But let’s be honest: there’s not much culture, architecture, or history to absorb between frozen drinks and water‑slide rotations. And yes, even your closest friends will eventually tire of seeing photos of your kids on the same pool slide from slightly different angles.

Real slow travel sits somewhere in the middle. Slow travel reduces effort rather than multiplying it, and it deepens enjoyment instead of diluting it. Slow travel gives you time to settle in, learn the layout, and fall into the daily rhythm that never appears on a top‑ten list in a guidebook. Neither fast nor slow travel is inherently wrong—each has its purpose. The trouble begins when fast travel is set to autopilot affecting depth, connection, and actual enjoyment of your destination. We learned this concept the hard way after a month‑long stay in Vienna, Austria last summer. We rented a centrally located Airbnb for the entire month, convinced we’d engineered the perfect plan: a stable home base with easy access to the rest of Central Europe. In a month we were able to squeeze in Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Krakow, Salzburg, Hallstat and Vienna itself—our calendar looked like a European rail brochure. On paper, it was masterfully planned “making the most” of our time. However, fast travel carries a hidden tax: the constant mental reset. Every new city meant a new transit system, a new language, different money, a new culture and norms to process, and a new city layout to decode. You burn more energy than you realize just figuring out where to stand, where to buy tickets, and which direction the trams run. That friction accumulates.

Our fast travel in Vienna finally caught up with us when we went to the wrong train station in Vienna and missed our train at a sister station. One small mistake triggered a chain reaction—an expensive Uber across town, missed trains, and a fresh set of tickets. Fast travel has no margin for error. I like to think I am the Tom Brady of travel planning, but even Brady throws an occasional interception. If you throw an interception at a bad time, it can derail the entire game. Small missteps become expensive ones, and they drain your patience just as quickly as your budget. The real breaking point in our Vienna trip came when one of us got sick. Fast travel operates on a zero‑day policy: no buffer, no recovery time, no room for real life. Constant motion turned a minor bug into pneumonia by the time we got home. The photos from that trip are beautiful. The pace that produced them was not.

If we could redo that month, we wouldn’t see less—we would simply see differently. One or two nearby cities. A full week in each. We learned that three days is rarely enough to settle in. The first day disappears into logistics; the last day is spent watching the clock for check-out times and checking train schedules. Longer stays let you cross the line from visitor to temporary resident, and that’s were the good stuff is!

This isn’t an argument against checking the boxes for the major sights. The Louvre in paris, St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, Westminster Abbey in London—of course they belong on the itinerary. But slow travel requires intention. It means resisting the urge to maximize every hour.

The biggest bang for the buck to assimilate at a new location is lodging. We typically look for a centrally located Airbnb that allows us tyo walk everywhere (if in a city), or a larger house in the country to create more of a “stay-cation” vibe. Having your own place, even for a week, nudges you into real life: grocery shopping, cooking, eating at a normal pace, a grill, a patio or just having a place to sit!. Those ordinary moments make for much stronbger connections wether traveling as a couple or as a familly. These ordinary moments connect you to your destination more deeply than sightseeing ever will.

The takeaway isn’t to abandon fast travel entirely. Speed has its moments. But it shouldn’t be the default. The sweet spot is a slower home base with a few intentional bursts outward. Give yourself room to breathe, to adjust, to recover. Sometimes the best part of travel is slowing down long enough to realize where you actually are.