Cheap Travel Is Overturning the World Order

What do high event ticket prices, asylum fraud, and the threats to Macchu Picchu have in common?

In 2026, I bet a lot of people don’t know who Noel Coward was, so it’s probably not the best idea to start off an argument with a Noel Coward reference. Coward was one of those Renaissance Men that the entertainment industry of the early 20th Century sometimes produced and our modern, more specialized pop culture makes unthinkable. He wrote plays, acted, composed music, and sang. But he also was a brilliant composer of prose and argument and an incisive social commentator and satarist. He was beloved both by the aristocracy and the commoner. Imagine Tom Stoppard, Brad Pitt, Max Martin, Bono, Weird Al, and Maureen Dowd all rolled up into a single person, and you get Noel Coward.

It would be impossible to do justice to everything Coward did— seriously, if you want a starting point, see David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which is a film adaptation of a Coward story and is one of the greatest movies the British film industry has ever produced— but one of my favorite works from Coward is a much more trifling piece, a silly song he wrote about tourism, which he composed in 1961 as part of his musical about a cruise ship, Sail Away. “Why Do the Wrong People Travel” captures, in a highly literate way, a lament that has been expressed for decades.

“The Taj Mahal and the Grand Canal, and the sunny French Rivera
Would be less oppressed if the Middle West would settle for somewhere rather nearer
Please do not think that I criticize or cavel at a genuine urge to roam
But why, oh why do the wrong people travel when the right people stay back home.”

Coward died in 1973, so we don’t know what he would have made of the era of cheap travel that we now live in. Adjusted for inflation, we pay less and less to jet wherever we please. Which means a lot more people can afford to do it. And it turns out, that changed everything.

The World Cup is going on now, so lets talk about ticket prices. European soccer fans are especially outraged that the $1000 plus that it costs to get into a World Cup game. This comes on top of reports of $10,000 tickets to NBA Finals games and New York Knicks fans flying to San Antonio to fill up the Spurs’ arena to watch the Knicks clinch the series, and of course the Taylor Swift Eras Tour of a few years ago with its $1,500 ticket prices. What is happening?

Well, one of the big things that is happening is that people are traveling to events, because air travel is so cheap. And this has changed the entire way event ticketing is priced as well as who sales are directed to. If you think of event ticketing for a big event 100 years ago, it looked something like this.

Tickets would go on sale at the venue, and folks would line up (and sometimes camp out) to buy them. The important thing to understand about this is that these were locals. They had to be. Indeed, if Pittsburgh were playing Detroit in the World Series, and you were a Pittsburgh resident looking to see the games in Detroit, you would have needed to travel by train (slower and more expensive than air travel) to Detroit twice, first to wait in line to get the tickets, and then to come back to attend the games.

Now to be clear, not all those folks in line were actual fans— many of them were, but some were in line to purchase tickets to scalp. There was a secondary market for tickets. But it was a pretty limited one. First, laws discouraged ticket scalping. And second, it was a pretty localized business— people needed to know where they could find tickets to buy from scalpers, and scalpers needed to know where they could sell them.

The result was that major events had local crowds. If you look at a picture of track and field from the 1932 Olympics, you can see that the stands of the LA Coliseum were not sold out, and you can freely assume that most of the people at the event were locals. (Fun fact, my father attended some of the track events as a 10 year old. Tickets were affordable during the Great Depression.)

The rise of the traveler attending events was gradual. My father attended the 1948 Olympics because he had been stationed in London in military intelligence, and said it was almost all locals at the Games. But by 1984, when I was alive and we went together, there were significant numbers of wealthy foreign visitors who came to the Games. The Los Angeles Airport authority built a huge new international terminal to handle all the visitors. Track and field was sold out in 1984, and it was harder to get tickets, with quite a lot of scalping. (I’m likely in this picture, by the way. Bet you can’t see me.)

Still, it was pretty extravagant to go to the Olympics in a foreign country. By 1996, I was traveling to the Olympics, in Atlanta. Track and field sold out again, and you had to buy tickets months in advance of the Games. Atlanta was overflowing with international visitors, and flights were all packed.

And of course, in 2028 in Los Angeles, not only will track and field sell out, but most tickets are priced well over $1,000 a ticket. Locals are already complaining, with quite a bit of justification, that they are completely shut out of purchasing Olympics tickets for desirable events.

People don’t just travel to sports events. They travel to concerts. The trailblazer here was probably the Grateful Dead, which attracted a curious number of hippies who got money from God-knows-where and followed the band around as it played shows (each Dead show featured a wildly different setlist, by the way).

When Taylor Swift toured, one of the things that drove the price of tickets into the stratosphere were “superfans”, who would buy tickets to every show (seeing the exact same show, unlike the Grateful Dead) in their city, and, yes, traveling all over the country and sometimes all over the world to see more Taylor Swift shows. People were literally getting on planes in the United States and flying to Latin America to watch Taylor Swift, thus driving up the ticket prices beyond what ordinary Latin Americans could afford.

The point isn’t that travel is the only thing driving ticket prices up— disposable income is up, money spent on recorded music has plummeted, and artists, promoters, and teams have figured out how to manipulate the ticket market to drive prices higher rather than just putting all the tickets onsale at once as in days of yore. But travel is definitely in the mix.

And the folks losing out are the locals. If you live in Kansas City and a bunch of folks are flying in for your World Cup matches or Taylor Swift shows and driving up your ticket prices, you end up being priced out of the stadium. The notion of big events being an opportunity for locals to see something great completely goes away— Spurs fans just got priced out of their own building to see the NBA Finals.

The thing about the wrong people traveling, though, is it doesn’t just apply to ticket prices. We can go to a totally different subject area and see the same story. So let’s talk about asylum fraud and, more generally, migrant flows. Asylum law was designed to address a specific “Never Again” aspect of the Holocaust— that nations turned away Jews looking for refuge and protection from the Nazis, and many of those Jews ended up in extermination camps. Accordingly, the global powers made “refouler” illegal— “refouler” being a legal term for sending a person back to a place where they would face extreme group-based persecution. Abiding by these new treaties, nations (including the US) passed asylum laws.

Here’s the thing about asylum— the limit on it was always that the asylees had to get to your country. In other words, the notion wasn’t that if there was a second Holocaust, everyone was going to get to come to the United States (or any other specific country); it was just that if people made it here (or any other country) trying to escape that second Holocaust, we would not turn them away the way we turned away the MS St. Louis with its 900 Jewish refugees in 1939.

This worked reasonably well for a long time. There was some asylum fraud— 60 Minutes did a report on it decades ago— but the numbers were pretty small. Because you had to get here, and it was hard to get here. Every once in awhile there was a mass migration from a neighboring country like Cuba or Haiti, and we would deal with that in various ways, but for the most part, people who did seek asylum (1) were real asylum claimants and (2) sought refuge in countries they could get to, which were reasonably close to the countries they were fleeing from.

But then, it became cheap to travel. I will use an example that isn’t exactly a route that asylees would necessarily fly on, but one where we have a lot of data. In 2026 dollars, an air ticket one way from Heathrow to Idlewild (now known as JFK Airport) in 1962 cost about $2750. Nowadays the cheapest one way ticket on that same route is about $330, less than one-eighth as much. International air travel went from something that basically no asylum applicant could afford to something that massive numbers of people around the world could scrounge up the money pay for. Which means, people look at the asylum system and think “what country would I like to emigrate to?”. Including a lot of people who have no valid claim for asylum.

Nobody knows for sure exactly how many asylum applicants are committing fraud. But we have a decent way of guessing— over 60% of asylum applications are rejected by the United States, a number that has stayed high through different administrations over the last 15-20 years. If 60% of asylum applications have no merit, that’s not because 60% of them were truly close calls where the applicant just didn’t quite meet the burden of proof or might have been let in if a different officer had heard the claim. There’s no way. If we give maybe 10% of the applications as being in that category, that means that half the applicants for asylum are committing fraud, filing applications despite obviously not qualifying or while falsifying the facts to try and qualify. And of course, they are all traveling (sometimes from very far off countries like Venezuela and Syria and China) to do it.

And because merely getting into the asylum process could get you a work permit in the United States, once the word got out that you could file a false application, the numbers shot up.

The key point here is that there’s no way this happens without cheap travel. They have to get within striking distance of the United States to come to our border and ask for asylum, and that used to be extraordinarily expensive to do. Now it isn’t. Massive numbers of people in the world who couldn’t afford a $2750 air ticket to Mexico or the Carribean can afford a $330 one.

And of course, it’s the locals who have to deal with this, as is always the case with immigration stories. We’ve seen how an influx of massive numbers of asylum applicants affect towns and cities on the US-Mexico border. Cheap travel means the locals lose.

Finally, let’s talk about the issue Coward specifically sang about— what happens to tourist spots. Macchu Picchu is under threat, because it sees as many as 5,600 tourists per day. Mount Everest is covered in discarded oxygen bottles (and a few corpses), and there’s a Disneyland style line up to the summit. The foundations of vintage buildings that line Venice’s famous canals are crumbling. Stories abound of reefs being destroyed, infrastructure being taxed, trash being strewn all over the place and places that are beloved for their natural beauty instead crawling with people.

And once again (except maybe on the top of Mount Everest where nobody lives), the locals lose.

To be clear, this isn’t actually a screed against the cheap air ticket. Indeed, the cheap air ticket is in fact a modern marvel. It allows more and more people to take vacations with their families or see relatives. It makes business cheaper to transact and encourages face-to-face contact. It brings the cultures of the world in contact with each other. It is— as Southwest Airlines said long ago in an advertising slogan— ”a symbol of freedom”.

Humanity is clearly better off that we can go wherever we want, whenever we want, at very little expense. The things I am describing are the externalities— they are the result, as Coward sang, of the wrong people traveling.

But we definitely need to think about what to do about this. Tourist spots really do need to cap capacity— it might be worth it for the nations of the world to bribe Nepal to cut down on the number of people it allows up on Mount Everest, for instance, and to invest more money both in capacity caps / high user fees and clean-up of sensitive places. “Locals only” restrictions on tickets— which outraged the powerful and rich people of New York when the Spurs floated them— are definitely worth considering for big events. (Sports teams sometimes impose them already, but they don’t do it to address the externalities of cheap travel; they are just looking for a loud crowd and a home field advantage.) And the asylum system is obviously broken and we need to build some real deterrence into the system so people know that the cheap airfare isn’t going to get them admission into the country on a false claim. We probably should also work more with other nations on “safe third country” agreements and refugee burden sharing so that fraudulent asylum applicants aren’t attracted by the notion that they might get to play the system by picking where they get to go to.

The cheap air fare is your classic societal and economic good, but with local losers and externalities, and we need to treat it that way.