The sun is shining and the summer holiday season is well and truly upon us at home and abroad.

With the summer vibes taking over Premium Tours HQ we have been reminiscing about some of our favourite summer holidays of years gone by.

Our tales of past travels have also reminded us of some of our once beloved holiday traditions (when did you last send a postcard?)… and frustrations (we’re looking at you travellers’ cheques).

Thinking back on these old holiday habits, we were filled with both nostalgia and also fascination at how quickly and unremarkably many of these changes happened; can you even imagine not being able to connect to wi-fi at your hotel now? Do you remember the day you stopped bringing a compact camera with you, relying only on your phone?

So, we decided to bring some of these old traditions back to life in our animated Travel Back in Time illustrative series.

Have a look at our illustrations below and reminisce about some of these retro travel items.

Walkmans

Before the days of streaming, before the days of downloads, even before the days of CDs there was cassettes, and with cassettes came Walkmans. The Walkman was a must have for long journeys or sunbathing on the beach. Of course you had to bring along each cassette too in your portable carry case. Skipping songs wasn’t an option, unless you wanted to gamble with the fast forward option.

Developing Photos

Ah the days before you could take hundreds of selfies until you got the perfect #travelgoals shot. Nope there was no sneaky previews of your travel snaps back in the day, and with a limit of how many photos you could take per spool you had to be extra selective in deciding what to capture. After your holiday you would take your photos along to be developed, the actual finished results remaining a total surprise and often a total disappointment, with a good portion of your snaps including a rogue finger covering the lens. The acceptable shots you did have would be stuck in an album or brought to the office and family gatherings for the next six months.

Travel Brochures

While travel brochures do of course still exist they are in no way the main planning tool for holidays that they once were. While nowadays we browse social media and online booking sites for our travel inspiration, up until a mere 10 years ago we would stock up on a selection of travel brochures from around the world flicking through page after page of exotic hotels and dreaming of our next getaway.

Travellers Cheques

Once the go-to way of spending money abroad, travellers cheques seem to have almost disappeared into oblivion. While travellers cheques were deemed a safer option than carrying cash over time more convenient options arose making travellers cheques less popular. As the use of travellers cheques declined it became harder and harder to find places to accept or exchange them, and many of us will have memories of traipsing around an unknown city looking for a bureau to exchange our cheques. While much less popular, travellers cheques are still available today.

Phone Cards

Nowadays public payphones are rapidly on the decline, either being eradicated entirely or given quirky new leases of life, such as a pop up phone box library. However, before mobile phones were the norm public payphone were important in keeping us connected and safe while travelling. In many countries we also needed to use a phone card when calling abroad which we loaded with credit, and could even use to reverse charge the call to whoever we were calling. However, using phone cards was a task often filled with frustrations as you typed in unnecessarily long codes while juggling your bags only to be cut off mid-dial…or was that just us?

Internet Cafés

As the world progressed to favour online communications over telephone, internet cafés became the way to stay in touch during our travels. Many of us will remember setting out to find the nearest internet café to our hotel. In fact, even up until the very recent addition of mobile boarding passes, internet cafés were often still needed for a last minute printing mission, but as more of our life becomes mobilised the thought of having to search for a special internet café to stay connected seems almost alien.

Postcards

With the evolution of our online life, another long-standing holiday habit fell into decline – postcards. It used to be the case that we would pick out ‘Wish You Were Here’ postcards to send smug tales of our travels to our parents, colleagues, friends, neighbours, great Aunt Doris, and whoever else was stuck back home. Now with the invention of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram it’s so much easier to be smug with one just one quick click.

Digital Cameras

Ok, we’re not talking about high quality DSLR cameras here. If you are a photography enthusiast with a pro camera chances are you still bring this on your travels today, but for us novice photographers our once beloved compact cameras are a thing of the past, with our phones being perfectly capable of capturing the highlights of our week in Marbella. Not too long ago it was standard practice to bring our mini digital camera along with us on holiday, loving our new spool-free freedom we would snap shots of everything throughout our holiday and upload every single image into a massive Facebook album upon arriving home. Now, compact cameras seem pretty irrelevant as camera quality becomes an ever bigger selling point of smartphones, and large Facebook albums are also rather extinct, as we instead favour the instantaneous and temporary nature of tools such as Snapchat to chart our holidays.

Paper Maps

While it may seem impossible to believe now, there was a day when Google maps didn’t exist. Rather than using our phones to navigate we’d unfold our paper maps, larger than our own heads, turning this way and that looking for a recognisable landmark and our desired route. Was this really any more difficult than deciphering Google maps’ directions? We’ll leave that one up to you.

Phrase Books

While every word we could possibly want to know is now at our fingertips with a plethora of translation apps available, we once had to pack a whole phrase book with us to aid in international conversations. The advantage of the phrase book was that rather than searching the words we wanted to know it suggested to us the words we never even knew we wanted to know. Many guide phrase books also included useful city tips and menu suggestions – and some even came with their very own massive fold-out map.