Which are you?
Are you the tourist who normally goes on holiday for a short period of time to relax in holiday resorts with full board or half board included?
Or are you the traveller who goes for the experience and a longer stay avoiding tourist traps to discover new horizons?
As we are now in the middle of the holiday season and no doubt have either had our holidays or are about to, we thought it a good idea to recap on some of the typical errors Learners of English make when using the words, travel, journey and trip..
We find that most Spanish natives confuse these words and we thought it helpful to clarify their use once and for all.
We generally use travel as a verb and not as a noun. It is how we describe the movement from A to B and how we get there. For example, ‘I travel to work by bus.’
We use journey as a noun when describing a short roundtrip. For example, ‘The journey from Dublin to Belfast took two hours.’
We use trip as a noun when we are talking about the starting point in our holiday to the finishing point. For example, if we are away for two weeks, we are likely to be asked when we return How was your trip?
It is worth noting that travel can be used as a compound noun (a noun made up of two or more words). For example, ‘business travel’, ‘economy travel’, ‘first class travel’. Be careful not to use travel as a noun on its own. For example, ‘The travel was good’. Use instead trip/journey bearing in mind the duration of the stay as explained previously.
Happy Holidays!