“Not even in my wildest dreams would I have imagined going all the way there and not being able to see anything. Well, let’s say I did get to ride in a gondola. I don’t think I can say I fulfilled my wish, but it’s something,” my friend laughs openly. A few tears trickle down the wrinkles on her cheeks, reflecting her years, as she continues to tell me her few adventures on the Old Continent.
She is just one among the thousands of elderly people who experience accidents while traveling. Personally, I can count three friends whose dreams, transformed into trips, were interrupted by an accident.
Let’s call it silver tourism, senior tourism, or grey tourism—any name that identifies older adults who, after working their entire lives, can finally start to enjoy their leisure time. Their lives, in the final chronological stage, represent peace, wisdom, and the closing of life’s circles. But this is also where problems arise. The friend I mentioned fell in one of the many alleyways in Venice and broke her leg: impossible to continue the tour like that. She was sent back home, but the good medical insurance she had purchased refunded all the hospital expenses upon her return. Another friend contracted a severe case of COVID, even after the pandemic had officially ended and the world had flung open its doors to hordes of tourists who had put their travels on hold. She is still hospitalized in a clinic in Rome, recovering very slowly. Lastly, at the risk of sounding like my friends are cursed or extremely unlucky, a third friend arrived at her destination and had a heart attack. She spent almost two months in a brand-new, ultra-modern hospital without paying a cent. All three are between fifty-five and seventy-five years old and are in as good health as their age and lifestyle habits allow.
I don’t have exact figures on how many older adults travel each year, but we can infer that, just as life expectancy has increased in our regions, the same has happened in tourism.
We finally want to retrace our poets’ steps in their European journeys of inspiration. We want to visit, smell, and touch art since, in our third-world countries, we cannot see great masterpieces of painting or sculpture, for example. We feel eager to hear opera, watch high-quality theater, or see films beyond the purely commercial. We want to stroll through ruins, walk down cobblestone streets, and climb staircases… but not all of us can, as our somewhat weak legs don’t allow for so much activity.What do we do? You tell us: What can you offer that won’t cost us an arm and a leg? What have you planned for this stage of life, besides wheelchairs at airports or hotel bathrooms with handrails and accessibility features? No, travel agencies, we don’t want “slow-motion” tours. We want to know how to spend our retirement in a fun but peaceful, adventurous but safe way. Amazing, wonderful places for our slightly tired and near-sighted eyes. We want rhythm and culture. We want it all, and we want it now, because time is not on our side!
