“Rick Steves is kind of like the Bob Ross of travel,” Ryan Howe tells me.
A 45-year-old strategic business coach from Custer, Michigan – population 297 – Howe grew up amongst farmland in his poverty-stricken village. Public Broadcasting Television (PBS) – America’s free-access TV channel where Ross debuted his Joy of Painting in 1983 and Steves’ his Travels in Europe with Rick Steves in 1991 – was his only means of escape.
“There’s no way to construe anything about what [Rick] does other than that it’s from a good place of wholesomeness. When I was stationed in Japan in 2002 with the Air Force and was to move to Pisa, Italy, I immediately went to my library on base to ask how to order Rick’s Italy guidebook from PBS. Three weeks later, I got it.”
Steves, 68, is the owner and founder of Rick Steves’ Europe, a small-group tour operator. He currently has 81 books and nine planning maps in print. No less than five of the top 10 travel books on Bookscan – which includes guides, memoirs and other books related to travel – are Steves’ books. He is also a television and radio host, activist, and beloved by many Americans who grew up on his shows, his books, and the calming voice he’s known for.
“His tone is very soothing,” says Vanessa Gordon, 34, CEO and publisher of a local Long Island magazine who started reading Steves’ guidebooks in the late 1990s and credits her desire to travel with those hours spent perusing his pages.He oozes ‘dad vibes’, is what we’re saying.
Born and raised north of Seattle, Washington, in Edmonds, Steves’s first trip to Europe was in 1969 with his parents when he was 14. He scribbled about what he saw and experienced on the back of postcards, and when he returned to Europe sans parents four years later, he came equipped with journals. Writing down all he learned came as naturally to him as posting on Instagram does to today’s young travellers.
In his 20s, Steves began teaching travel through a non-credited student-run arm of his alma mater, University of Washington, and a decade after that first trip, he self-published Europe Through the Back Door, his first European guidebook.
Tamar Marder, stay at home mum and blogger at World by Weekend who grew up in northern California first remembers hearing about Steves from her parents when she was 12. They took her on a trip to Italy and used Rick Steves’ Italy. Since then, Marder has used his guidebooks to plan many trips across Europe.
A couple of years ago, while on a Sicilian Christmas holiday with her family, she ended up at the kitchen table of Mariarita, a fourth-generation vintner. After the scheduled tour that they had booked ended, Mariarita invited them into her home, and they sat, surrounded by photos of her family, a Christmas tree alight with presents piled underneath.
“We chatted about life in Sicily, the wine business, and the local products she used to prepare the meal while my children crawled around under the table,” says Marder. “These are the types of experiences that Rick Steves promotes – cultural exchanges and interactions with locals. Because while travel is about seeing the sights and learning the history, it’s also about meeting people and learning about different ways of life around the world. I may forget what year the Normans conquered Sicily or who built the churches in Palermo, but I will remember sitting at Mariarita’s table, drinking wine, and eating delicious food.”
For as long as Steves has been a public figure, he’s been a supporter of advocacy for communities and organisations that cross cultural divides – his company donates to climate-smart nonprofits and Bread for the World, a Christian group working to end world hunger.
He’s also helped the fight to legalise marijuana across the US and has donated £7.5 million for two community centres in his hometown and a 24-unit apartment building for homeless women and their children with the local YWCA.
Though Steves’ fans tend to skew North American and in the 40-plus range, folks from further afield and a younger subset of travellers have fallen in love with his easy-going vibe.
“I resonate with the emphasis he places on flexibility,” 29-year-old Rocky Trifari from New Jersey who runs The Rocky Safari Guide, tells me. “It’s at the core of his travel philosophy and it’s at the centre of mine as well. Flexibility is a big factor that has allowed me to adopt long-term travel as a lifestyle while working as a digital nomad.”
Trifari learned of Steves from an Australian couple he met in Zadar, Croatia five years ago. But he says that Steves’ name pops up in more conversations than he can count on his travels across the world.
Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, but based in Madrid for the past decade, Claire Riley, owner of luxury travel company Duende Travels, says she knows plenty of millennial-aged people who always travel with Steves books as their guide: “I think Rick Steves appeals to Americans [because] he seems so relatable and normal; his show airs on public television, so almost everyone has access to [him]. He makes travel so accessible to everyone [and] has options for more budget-minded people, options for people who want to splurge, and everything in between. There’s no gatekeeping from Rick Steves.”
It’s clear that Steves has had an influence over multiple generations of US travellers, and will continue to do so because of his affable demeanour and prolific publishing. In fact, just the other day, my mother told me she found a Rick Steves France guidebook in a second-hand shop and picked it up for my sister who’s travelling to the country next month. It seems that Steves is always in the right place at the right time.
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Guidebook pioneer Rick Steves: the man who sold the wonders of Europe to America - The Telegraph
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