A Cosmopolitan Revelation: Travel as a Religious Act with Rick Steves’ Europe

Abstract

For nearly fifty years, travel writer Rick Steves has been guiding Americans through Europe. Nicknamed a “travel guru” by The New York Times, Steves preaches a prescriptive, redemptive vision of travel: by packing light, pursuing historically-rich experiences, and seeking to become a “temporary local” and extrovert in search the “real Europe,” Americans can be cured of their ethnocentricity and experience a cosmopolitan revelation. It is through this sense of moral purpose that traveling the “Rick Steves way” becomes more than a tourism: it is religion. This article explores how Rick Steves’ vision for travel is performed into being discursively and aesthetically, thereby constructing a particular material configuration of Europe imbued with iconic power.