Editors Reads Verdict
De Botton uses travel as a lens for examining how we experience beauty, novelty, and disappointment. Less a travel book than a book about the psychology of travel — thought-provoking and stylishly written.
What We Loved
- The pairing of specific destinations with specific thinkers — Barbados with Baudelaire, the Alps with Wordsworth — is brilliantly organised
- De Botton asks questions about travel that most travel writers take for granted
- The philosophical framework makes the book useful as a way of thinking about your own travel experiences
- The prose is elegant and accessible — dense ideas delivered in readable prose
Minor Drawbacks
- Some readers find the philosophical apparatus more interesting than the travel itself
- De Botton's own journeys are less compelling than the ideas they occasion
- The book is more about anticipation and disappointment than about travel as it actually happens
Key Takeaways
- → The anticipation of travel typically exceeds the reality because our imagination edits out the self we are trying to escape
- → We rarely know how to look at the places we visit — art and literature can teach us to see
- → Curiosity is a discipline, not a natural attribute — it must be practised in familiar places before it works in foreign ones
- → Departure and arrival are almost always more interesting than the middle of a journey
| Author | Alain de Botton |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Vintage |
| Pages | 272 |
| Published | April 9, 2002 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Travel, Philosophy, Essays |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Philosophical readers who want to think about why they travel as much as where they go — useful before a trip, illuminating after one. |
Alain de Botton opens The Art of Travel with a chapter on Barbados that begins not in Barbados but in his flat on a grey January morning, studying a travel brochure. The gap between the brochure’s Barbados — azure water, deserted beach, a lone hammock — and the Barbados he eventually reaches — sunburned, slightly bored, accompanied by his own anxieties — is the book’s central subject. Why does the reality of travel so consistently disappoint the imagination of it? And what would it mean to travel in a way that honoured both the places we visit and the self that is doing the visiting?
De Botton structures the book around journeys he undertakes and the writers, painters, and philosophers who have most illuminated the particular question each journey raises. A trip to the English Lake District becomes an occasion to read Wordsworth on how to pay attention to landscape. A journey through Provence is organised around Van Gogh’s letters, which describe an intensity of visual engagement with the same countryside that most tourists drive through in an afternoon. A visit to a Holiday Inn in Hammersmith — which de Botton checks into for a night to test the idea of travel as estrangement — occasions a reading of Xavier de Maistre’s eighteenth-century Voyage Around My Room, a travel narrative restricted to the furniture of a single apartment.
The best chapter in the book is probably the one on anticipation, which argues that the imagination of a place is always more satisfying than the place itself because the imagination edits. The brochure shows the beach at dawn with no one on it; what it cannot show is that the photographer woke at five to catch it empty, that the beach is crowded by nine, that you will spend most of your holiday managing sunburn and deciding where to eat. The self who imagines the holiday leaves behind their anxieties, their boredom, their tendency to worry about work — but the actual self has to come along. This gap between imagined and experienced is not a failure of will or attention; it is structural, and understanding it changes how you travel.
The Art of Travel is less a travel book than a book about the psychology of travel — a distinction that matters because readers expecting vivid destination writing will be disappointed. De Botton’s own journeys are present as occasions for philosophical reflection rather than as interesting narratives in themselves. But as a set of intellectual tools for thinking about why we go where we go and what we hope to find there, the book is unusually precise. Reading it before a trip tends to produce a more attentive traveller; reading it after one tends to produce a more honest account of what actually happened.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Art of Travel" about?
A philosophical meditation on why we travel, what we hope to find, and why the reality so rarely matches the anticipation — structured around de Botton's own journeys and the writers, artists, and thinkers who have illuminated the meaning of travel.
Who should read "The Art of Travel"?
Philosophical readers who want to think about why they travel as much as where they go — useful before a trip, illuminating after one.
What are the key takeaways from "The Art of Travel"?
The anticipation of travel typically exceeds the reality because our imagination edits out the self we are trying to escape We rarely know how to look at the places we visit — art and literature can teach us to see Curiosity is a discipline, not a natural attribute — it must be practised in familiar places before it works in foreign ones Departure and arrival are almost always more interesting than the middle of a journey
Is "The Art of Travel" worth reading?
De Botton uses travel as a lens for examining how we experience beauty, novelty, and disappointment. Less a travel book than a book about the psychology of travel — thought-provoking and stylishly written.
Ready to Read The Art of Travel?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: