Where Travel Stands, 25 Years After 9/11

Skift Take Twenty-five years after 9/11, travel has become remarkably easy for people the system is prepared to move. The growing divide is over who gets that treatment. Twenty-five years after September 11, the most obvious changes to travel are also the least interesting ones. We know the familiar list: airport security, shoes, and liquids, hardened cockpits, longer lines, and an entire generation of travelers who have never known flying without them. Some of those rituals are now disappearing. The larger system that grew around them is not. What changed more fundamentally was the role of identity in travel. Over the past quarter-century, the industry became extraordinarily good at making trips easier to search, buy, and navigate, while governments became far more sophisticated at deciding who gets to make those trips in the first place. For some travelers, the result is a journey more seamless than anything imaginable in 2001. For others, the friction now begins well before the airport. I have lived both sides of that change. A decade ago, I wrote an essay for Skift about what it was like to move through airports as a Muslim