Air travel was special given that not everyone could do it. But therein lies the rub. Flying was expensive, more dangerous than today and, if you happened to be a minority, fraught with discrimination.
So in the past, maybe travel was more romantic – if one could afford it. But for all the rose tinted fantasies about April in Paris, the realities of difficult long distance communication, hard to verify hotel bookings, the lack of ATMs (remember Traveler’s Checks?) and language barriers often made for difficult travel. Today we have many more tools to make the day-to-day reality of travel easier.