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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

"He noted that in 1960, when the jet age began, around 25 million international trips were taken. Last year, the number was 1.3 billion."

I honestly did not expect the number to be that high.

So a double digit percentage of all humanity travels internationally, every year.

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It might very well be enough for double-digits still, but there's a distribution: Many people take multiple trips per year.

The thing that I'd immediately wonder there is how "international trip" is calculated. It seems most probable that that number is calculated as "number of flights x people per flight". That would however lead to immense inflation. For instance you go on a round trip that involves 2 lay overs both ways, that'd be 6 "international trips." Do that once a quarter and a single person is taking 24 "international trips" in a year.

Could be, but I think that number includes people taking multiple trips each. Think businessmen.

I really don't think it's close to double digits. I don't even consider myself as having travelled a lot and I've taken two international trips per year for the last five or so years on average. There should be people who do dozens of international trips a year but there must be a lot of people who do two or three international trips a year.

Like a lot of things it's probably a heavily-skewed distribution. For a large number of europeans it could be a half dozen from holidays alone. For businesspeople in Europe it could easily be dozens of trips per year.

But there's probably huge swaths of the population who have never traveled internationally for economic reasons, or because they live in a large country (like China, the US, India or Russia) which makes that less necessary.

Or my relatives in Geneva, who regularly shop in France, dine in Germany, and then drive home, in the same day.

Also the schengen zone

That sounds like a very American viewpoint. If you look at most of the rest of the world international borders are a lot closer and it's trivial to visit half a dozen countries in a single day. And in some places it's routine to make international trips on a regular basis.

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