Your Money: Put your
travel bucket list on turbo
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[March 28, 2017]
By Chris Taylor
NEW
YORK (Reuters) - Waiting until you are retired to travel to all your
bucket list destinations? You might want to step on it.
With ice sheets melting, the Great Barrier Reef dying off and animals
being poached to extinction on African savannas, delaying your dream
trips could be very costly.
That is what helped spur Valerie Jalufka into action. "My advice is to
get out there and see it, because the world is changing every year,"
says Jalufka, a Houston IT consultant who at age 39 has already hit
every continent on the planet.
Her most recent voyage: Australia and New Zealand, where she spent three
weeks bungee-jumping with Kiwis and snorkeling at the Great Barrier
Reef. She has also gone on safari in Tanzania, and visited everywhere
from Tasmania to Tierra del Fuego, often with the tour operator
Abercrombie & Kent.
Jalufka is part of a wave of youthful adventurers who are taking travel
professionals by surprise by taking their once-in-a-lifetime trips in
their 30s and 40s.
Their motivation is twofold: An "experiences over stuff" mentality that
is defining younger generations, and a "get there before it's gone"
reality of a planet in the throes of climate change, making travel
dreams more pressing than ever.
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Of course, bucket lists themselves are not new: About 54 percent of
travelers say they have traveled to cross something off their bucket
list, and more than three-quarters of agencies say bucket list travel
will be "hot" or "very hot" in 2017.
But in 2016, a report for Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection expected
about a third of American travelers to Asia to be in their late 50s and
early 60s. Nope - turns out it was travelers in their 30s and 40s who
headed there in droves.
"Younger travelers are thinking in terms of a bucket list, in much
higher numbers than expected. It is kind of mind-blowing," says Kit
Kiefer, who authored the whitepaper for Berkshire Hathaway Travel
Protection.
WHERE TO GO
Among the locations being checked off by American travelers: Australia,
with a 6.2 percent increase expected for 2017, and Antarctica, which had
a 10 percent boost from Americans in 2016. Perennial favorites like the
pyramids in Egypt and African safaris are also luring bucket-listers
abroad.
The irony is that the spiking popularity of bucket-list travel could
endanger the locations themselves. But the real threats are on the more
macro level of climate change: Melting ice caps are due to rising global
temperatures and CO2 emissions, not because of more tourist vessels to
Antarctica. Coral at the Great Barrier Reef is dying off because of
ocean acidification, not primarily because of more snorkelers and the
boats that bring them.
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![](../images/032817pics/busine5.jpg)
Tourists snorkel near a turtle as it looks for food amongst the
coral in the lagoon at Lady Elliot Island north-east of the town of
Bundaberg in Queensland, Australia, June 9, 2015. REUTERS/David
Gray/File Photo
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Tour
providers are sniffing opportunity and are ramping up their offerings. High-end
vacation membership organization Exclusive Resorts has 18 "Once-in-a-Lifetime"
journeys, including diving with whale sharks off the Yucatan Peninsula and
ice-trekking in Patagonia.
You do
not have to go totally broke to have unique experiences. Some of the biggest
year-over-year increases in travel have to been to places that have added more
air routes or been aggressive in appealing to tourists with low-cost deals.
These are places like Reykjavik, in Iceland, and Dubai in the U.A.E., or
Portugal's Lisbon, says Keith Nowak, communications director at booking website
Travelocity.com.
Being specific from the outset will help keep costs down. "Instead of saying 'I
want to go to South America,' "say 'I want to take a cycling tour through the
Andes next spring,'" suggests Rebecca Warren, managing editor for the magazine
of Lonely Planet, the popular guidebook publisher.
Valerie Jalufka deals with known expenses by planning well in advance - after
all, bucket-list trips are not usually planned last-minute - and directing money
into dedicated accounts every month.
Jalufka is far from finished with her bucket list. Next up: Hanging out with
polar bears in Canada's Arctic. "I want to see them while they are still in
their natural habitat," she says. "Because I think that is going to change in my
lifetime."
(The writer is a Reuters contributor. The opinions expressed are his own.)
(Editing by Beth Pinsker and Dan Grebler)
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