Why are Americans and Asians in such a rush when traveling in Europe?

You seem to be ignoring price, and refuting evidence of the price in your comments throughout here.

While there may be $500 one-way tickets from NYC, NYC is on the tip of the US closest to Europe. There’s no way you can reasonably assume all Americans would use NYC as their gateway to Europe, or could do so in a timely and cheap manner. Going from DFW -> Frankfurt in July is showing $1,700 round trip per-person. If my SO and I are going to spend $3,400 getting to Europe, then I would want to see as much as I possibly could – which means a packed itinerary that’s prepared well in advance.

And even $1,700 in the US is being pretty generous. For people who don’t live near international airports, the flights to those airports can cost hundreds more. A puddle jumper from my hometown in Wyoming to Denver International costs $500 each way per person(The alternative is a day of driving each way, so that’s your vacation time – 2 days right there). So for 2 people you’re losing 4 vacation days driving or $2,000 flying. This is not something you ignore when planning a vacation!

Friendly Ghost mentioned in the comments that round-trip tickets from Indonesia cost $2,000 and you retorted with the cost of a one-way trip being $800 to Singapore and $100 from Singapore to Indonesia. So, round-trip, based on your numbers, is $1,800(I’m not sure your retort proved what you thought it proved). Given that the cost of flights can change wildly throughout the year, a difference of $200 isn’t surprising. Also, someone in Indonesia who wants to go to Europe isn’t going to think “Ok, the tickets are going to cost $2,000….that’s just too rich for my blood. BUT…if they only costs $1,800…that’s perfect!” These are just the tickets to get there, if $200 is really cramping your budget that much, it’s probably best to continue saving and go later.

I see the above as an addendum to David Mulder’s answer. You just seem to be ignoring the price like it’s nothing, when the real price for a lot of Americans is going to be in the thousands just for getting there.

There’s also likely a selection bias, and it’s two-fold.

The Americans you’re more likely to see in Europe going from one place to the next are going to hit the huge tourist attractions. So, if you mostly notice Americans in these areas – they’re necessarily more likely to be the type on a tight schedule. They’re not the kind of tourist to go off the beaten path and explore. Some of them will, but not all of them. Then, the ones who do explore are going to be spread across all of Europe. What are the chances you bump into one of them randomly?

The additional selection bias is that people who want to do rest and relaxation are less likely to go to Europe to do it. There are plenty of places in Florida, Texas, Southern California, Mexico, and the Caribbean that allow for R&R. I could do two weeks of cruises in the Caribbean for less than the flights to Europe.

In most cities, you want to either spend a few hours or a week or two, and there’s not much point doing anything in between. You can pick off the highlights in a few hours (except maybe in London and Paris), and it will take a week or two to get to know the place and properly relax into it. So if you want to visit more than one city on your holiday, you might as well just take a few hours per city and do lots of them.

I’m going to have to disagree with Calchas. I know a lot of people who engage in this mode of traveling, but I can’t think of a single person whom I would say enjoys it.

Others have given reasonably good explanations of the phenomena, but I’d like to point out an error the question-asker has made — it’s not just Americans and Asians visiting Europe that do this. Europeans traveling to the states frequently commit the same error (yes, in my opinion it is an error to live this way).

I live in Switzerland, and I recently chatted with a colleague who: is a naturalized Swiss resident like myself and grew up in Canada and India. He recently took a trip to the U.S. with his wife and two kids, and did the same “checking off the list” type of travel. 6 hours at the Grand Canyon, 1 day in Vegas, 2 days in Canada, I forget the rest. When he told me in advance of his plans, I gently indicated skepticism that this would be much of a vacation.

When he came back he confirmed my suspicions.

Anyway, others have discussed the motivational causes… I just wanted to point out this is pretty universal phenomena, at least among cultures wealthy enough to travel this way.

But even people arranging their own “Europe trip” seem to repeat that pattern.

Perhaps the answer to your question then, is that many people enjoy this mode of travelling.

I have to say, there is almost a hint of snobbery in both the question and the answers. As though the only proper way “to experience” a place is to spend six months in it fully integrated with the locals; and anyone who is content merely to look at the tourist attractions in a city, soak in the atmosphere over a couple of days, and then move on to the next city is at best deluded or forgivably time-pressured, and at worse an unsophisticate.

Many folks do not find frequent travel remotely stressful, but actually do find being stuck in one place rather stressful. I would include myself in that respect.

I think it is fair to say that this energy typically dulls as one grows a bit older but I would never suggest that the experiences I or others had in their younger years are now invalid by the new, and more aged metric.

When I was less busy with my job and not travelling anyway, I would leave early on the Friday, catch a flight to a new city and spend the weekend there before returning early Monday morning and going straight back to work. In my view this gave me plenty of time to relax and enjoy the place without spending my money needlessly on getting bored. I am under no illusions that my visits are at best cursory but I’ve never pretended otherwise.

I wanted to add an answer that does not contradict the others, but instead includes some personal reflections.

When the younger crowd sets out to “DO” Europe, their ‘peer status’ rises in proportion to the number of places visited. It means, for example, that 4 or 5 hours in France counts as “DOING” France just as much as 4 or 5 days does. It gives the person the right to say, “Yeah, France is cool” with the authority of one who has been there. If the same person can also say “Yeah, Italy totally rocks”, they accrue more ‘street cred’ and peer status.

Personal note: When I was a younger traveller, this sort of thing was measured by the number of entry and exit stamps in one’s passport. A person who had to visit the embassy in order to get more pages in their passport was perceived as a seasoned veteran, and nobody cared whether or not the person could actually give an informative narrative about where they had been. Keeping with the example of France, whether or not the person took the funicular to Sacre Coeur or whether or not the person visited Saint-Quentin, Aisne or even if they know whether or not Cannes has a tube system is a secondary level of experience which is less important for many people in the younger crowd.

The arrival of Schengen dampened the sport of collecting passport stamps because now you get a single stamp for the entire zone, so you have to visit Schengen a lot in order to fill up a passport. Today, you have to use mapping applications like the one on my profile page. Facebook offers a utility to put stickers on a world map. Others like to list out the countries. So the notion of peer status is still there, and it’s especially valuable in the US and Canada.

Finally, once my MIL had a flight which was diverted to Zurich for an unscheduled landing. The plane sat on the runway for about 90 minutes, passengers could not even depart to airside. But she was thrilled. She called her friends from the plane and announced she was in Switzerland! She took photos from the window of the plane and proudly displays them in her office. Lesson: adding a new place gives bragging rights.

First of all I have to say I totally agree with jpatokal answer. But on top of that I wanted to point out a flaw in the reasoning of your question; There are two possible reasons to go on a holiday:

1. To relax, not being stressed
2. To see stuff you never get the chance to see normally

Now, for some people it makes sense to combine those things – like it seems you have the luxury to do – , but for others during certain holidays it just makes sense to focus on one of the two. So during the types of holidays you so adamantly hate the focus is purely on the second thing. And given the things like time (10 days off per year) and financial (flying to the other side of the world is expensive, so you won’t do it multiple times) constraints it makes perfect sense to focus purely on option 2. And yes, by the time you return you will be barely able to walk (I once slept 24 hours straight after such a trip), but by the end you will have seen and done everything you wanted to see and do.

Now, personally my interests have shifted from famous monuments (couldn’t care less about those anymore) to actually experiencing and finding the differences between cultures and to do that I simply have to take a lot more time, but the point is mostly that that’s a result of my priorities. With different priorities you (obviously) get a different schedule and that too makes sense. That’s not ‘lack of experience’ or ‘lack of understanding’, but simply a different focus. A lot of Americans also decide to lock themselves up in a random Mediterranean resort, those are the types where the focus is on relaxing (though I never understood why they travel half the world to relax here, but I guess that’s for bragging rights).

Some people just appreciate that type of travel, myself included, while I am not an American nor Asian and I have more than 30 days vacation annually.

I would love to spend a 10 days vacation in visiting more cities, try a bit of that city and a bit of the other one. This gives me joy and happiness. Although I do not have tight schedules, I just do that as I go, so if I like a place, I spend an extra day or two there, then move on. One of the reasons, partially, is adding a new place to the list of places I visited. Also, this leaves a lot more in that city for the next visit, which might be in a different season which has different weather and different activities, so this is a plus for me.

Anyway, some other people love to live as locals when they travel, eat every local dish, try the whole package in a specific place and see everything to be seen and not to be seen (like you I guess).

Regarding experience, I do not really think this is a main reason. Some people when travelling for the first time they tend to spend a whole month in one place, while others who travel a lot they tend spend a week in 3 cities. Some people they just like the first type of travel, while others like the second type. I think it simply is a personal preference.

I have seen the same happening with Europeans in Australia and New Zealand, with young Europeans on their first InterRail pass or long road trip.

There is so much to discover and so little time to do it in.

It takes time to learn to slow down and do only a few locations in a trekking holiday. Many people do one location holidays, which is all right for them. Quite a few people do an one resort holiday, all right if it makes them happy.

But finding the inner quiet to combine traveling around and slowing down enough to enjoy where you are takes experience and many people never have/had the time to learn that.

After 30 odd years of traveling around for holidays, most of that alone, I still have to sit down in the planning stage not to make the same mistake again. So much to see, so little time this trip.

I’d posit two reasons: limited time and not understanding the size of the continent.

In both the US and Japan, the standard vacation time allotment is ten (10) days per year, which translates to two weeks. (And in Japan, if you’re a salaryman, using all your allowance is considered near-treasonous towards your company.) Substract a week of that for sick leave (often included in your total), weddings, funerals, random family get-togethers etc, and you’ll likely only have a week left. Since flights, hotels etc are expensive, for many it’s a “once in a lifetime” thing, so they feel they must cram Paris and London and Rome and Barcelona into that week.

Also, first-time travelers attempting an itinerary like this often don’t understand how much time gets eaten up when traveling from point A to point B: check out from hotel, go to airport, check in to flight, wait around, fly, repeat in reverse and whoops, there’s a day gone. (Even when available, high-speed trains aren’t all that much better.) And even when they do account for this, they don’t fully figure in the effect of jet-lag, how tired you get when walking around sightseeing all day, etc.