Kirkwood Community College is a public community college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Kirkwood has a secondary campus in Iowa City, and several additional regional and county centers located in Belle Plaine, Coralville, Hiawatha, Monticello, Tipton, Vinton, Washington and Williamsburg.
Generation Z (Gen Z; born 1997–2012) is reshaping global tourism through digital fluency, ethical awareness, and a desire for authentic, sustainable travel experiences. This study surveys 413 Gen Z travelers across France, Portugal, Romania, and the USA to map their booking behaviors, information sources, transport modes, accommodations, dining practices, and leisure activities. The findings reveal a strong preference for independent online bookings and social-media-influenced destination choices (Instagram, TikTok), with air and car travel being used for long-distance journeys and walking/public transit being used for local journeys. Accommodation spans commercial hotels and private rentals, while informal, local dining and nature- or culture-centered leisure prevail. Chi-square tests were performed to identify differences between countries. To reveal distinct traveler segments and their country’s modulations towards sustainability, a hierarchical cluster analysis was performed. The results uncover four segments: “Tech-Active, Nature-Oriented Minimalists” (32.3% in France); “Moderate Digital Planners” (most frequent across all countries, particularly dominant among Romanian respondents); “Disengaged and Indecisive Travelers” (overrepresented in the USA); and “Culturally Inclined, Selective Sustainability Seekers” (>30% in France/Portugal). Although sustainability is widely valued, only some segments of the studied population consistently act on these values. The results suggest that engaging Gen Z requires targeted, value-driven digital strategies that align platform design with the cohort’s diverse sustainability commitments.
While critics agree that Frederick Douglass underwent a radical transformation during his first transnational journey through Ireland, Scotland, and England (1845-7) and that Classical Rome and Lord Byron's Promethean Romantic ideals shaped his mid-nineteenth century novella, The Heroic Slave (1853), and autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass's 1886-7 Italian Grand Tour is largely overlooked. To redress this oversight, I bring the author's Rome diaries, letters, and lectures together to illustrate the intersection between travel and his quest for absolute equality. With Classical Rome and Lord Byron as starting points, I emphasize how Douglass sculpts Black Heroic models and Intellectuals into an American freedom-fighting mould to counter racist caricatures. Ultimately, his experience as a Black traveller rambling freely in the Eternal City provides 'the ethnological evidence to combat American prejudice against the darker colored races'. While hearkening back to Byron's Romantic vision and to Classical Rome, Douglass's Italian travel writing, as I argue, also reframes theories of race and travel.
