What travel changed for eight older travellers: an interview study
In the late 1990s a University of Georgia researcher interviewed eight frequent travellers aged 56 to 89 to see whether their trips had transformed them. The study, published in 2001, found subtle learning but no deep transformation.
What the study did and found
The article, “The impact of travel on older adults: an exploratory investigation” by Donald N. Roberson, appeared in the journal Tourism in 2001. Roberson mailed questionnaires to about 50 people, received 26 back and interviewed eight frequent travellers aged 56 to 89 who had said a trip was meaningful to them (Roberson, 2001).
He judged their accounts against Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning. None showed a perspective transformation, but the interviews did show change in narrower meaning schemes: a wider view of what people knew, a changed sense of self, unsettled assumptions and deeper understanding (Roberson, 2001).
Why it is cited
The paper was an early attempt to ask what travel does to older people rather than how to sell trips to them. OpenAlex lists 12 works that cite it, six of them studies of older people’s tourism.
Its most solid result is a negative one. Any source that uses it as proof that travel transforms older people, or improves their health, overstates it: the study measured no health outcome and found no transformation. It supports a narrower claim, that trips can shift knowledge, attitudes and self-confidence in modest ways.
The sample was small, hand-picked and alike: healthy, college-educated, mostly retired Americans who already valued travel, each interviewed once (Roberson, 2001).
Later studies are larger but observational: a 2024 analysis of 7,037 US adults aged 51 and over linked long-distance travel with better cognition and less loneliness, without showing cause (Cole et al., 2024).
The topic today
Research on seniors’ wellbeing in tourism has grown, but a 2022 review of 56 articles still judged it limited (Chang et al., 2022). In AARP Research’s 2026 survey, health and accessibility needs shaped how people aged 50 and over travelled rather than whether they did (Choi-Allum, 2026).
For the current picture, see our explainer Travel in Later Life: What an Eight-Person Study Found.