Taking Our Time Off

To be sure, slower doesn't necessarily mean cheaper. A sluggish top-of-the-range cruise on a luxury barge through the canals of the Netherlands will cost more than £1,600 a week. The bill for a five-day stroll through the Tuscan landscape (with luggage sent on ahead, of course) could be at least £500—before the cost of the trip to Italy. And the fare for a one-way overnight trip from Paris to Barcelona on the Elipsos service—billed as a "train hotel"—can run £250, or the price of a night in a very nice Hyatt.

But for slow travelers, the benefits make up for the cost. "One of the huge advantages of slow travel is that you actually feel you are traveling," says Dan Kieran, the British writer and champion of slow travel who gave up flying 15 years ago. "You find yourself getting into conversation with people. I went out to Poland last year and found myself giving English lessons to a woman and her 8-year-old daughter."

For devotees, the biggest advantage of leisurely tourism is that slow means green. "Among my friends I find that more and more are limiting themselves to perhaps one flight a year," says Kieran. Europeans in particular are buying into low-carbon holidays; Inntravel, a U.K.-based firm specializing in skiing and cycling holidays, says train journeys are up 50 percent over last year. Canny train operators have quickly figured out how to flaunt their environmental credentials. In France, train travelers who purchase tickets at voyages-sncf.com can now measure their virtue on an "Eco-Gauge." (For the record, a high-speed-train ride between Paris and Marseille will emit 10kg of carbon per passenger, compared with 187kg if traveled by plane and 313kg by car.) "Slow travel is like buying organic food," says John Kester of the World Tourist Organization in Madrid. "You might do it for ideological reasons—or because it tastes better."

But the popularity of fast trains and slow boats doesn't mean air travel is over. In fact, global airline traffic continues to rise steadily at 5 percent a year—a rate that can be attributed in part to the growing numbers of newly affluent fliers flooding the jetways. What's changed is the increased use of charter planes for longer holidays—Abercrombie & Kent now offers a month long tour of Easter Island by private jet—and for travel to villas and second homes. The number of second-home-owning Americans has risen 900 percent over the last two decades. In Europe, cheap air travel has made second-home ownership a positively middle-class phenomenon; 30 percent of Europe's concrete now flows to Spain, a second-home mecca. Residential tourism is by proxy more leisurely—the typical American second-home owner spends 39 nights per year in their vacation place. At more upscale time shares, like the Ritz-Carlton Club, three to six weeks is the minimum buy-in. "There is a growing segment of the population that can spend multiple weeks on holiday, in more and more upscale vacations," notes Paul Chiu, head of Accenture's transportation and travel-service practice.

Indeed, what slow travelers most crave is time. Pauline Kenny, founder of slowtrav.com, which promotes holidays such as Italian-villa stays, says that parking yourself in one place forces you to move at a different speed. "We call it 'concentric circle' travel—you travel in an area that's close to you," she says. "You don't have to spend your vacation following someone else's list, doing a two-hour drive to visit a 'must-see.' There are tons of wonderful villages that no one has ever heard of."

They're also a lot more likely to put you in the holiday mood than a 10-day, 10-city tour of the Continent, or a packaged sun-and-sand vacation. Still, it's important to note that slower holidays are primarily a Western phenomenon. While many Americans and Europeans can afford to take their time and plot their own paths, developing-world tourists are still trying to log enough hours and wages to afford the traditional one-week packaged tour. But there are signs that more-leisurely travel is catching on even in emerging markets. Urban Chinese are taking weekend trips to country farms to de-stress. Budget hotel chains catering to the growing number of domestic travelers in India and China are increasingly offering chill-out amenities like spas.