Why Rick Steves likes to get ripped off when he travels

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Unlike probably every other traveler, Rick Steves said he likes it when he gets scammed in Europe.

He views it as an educational opportunity, a chance to learn from the experience and share it with others.

“When I get ripped off, I celebrate,” said Steves. “They don’t know who they just ripped off. I go home and share the news.”

Steves, the popular author, TV and radio host, will share stories about scams and other adventures from the road, at a talk in Cleveland next week, “Why We Travel,” sponsored by Ideastream Public Media. It’s part of a nine-day tour through the eastern United States to promote both travel and public media, which also includes a concert of European orchestral music with the Toledo Symphony (the Toledo in Northwest Ohio, not Spain).

Steves, the author of more than 100 guidebooks, said travel is the best way he knows to broaden one’s perspective.

“As the world gets smaller and the challenges confronting us get bigger, I think the value of travel is greater than ever,” he said in an interview Thursday while he waited to board a plane in Seattle, where he lives. “Culture shock isn’t something to avoid. It’s a good thing. It’s the growing pains of a broader perspective.”

Steves joked that his mission is to encourage Americans to travel beyond Orlando.

“Instead of Disney World for the fifth time, try Portugal,” said Steves, who also writes a weekly column that appears in the Sunday Plain Dealer. “It’s not going to bite you.”

He called Europe the “wading pool for world exploration.”

Steves first traveled to Europe in 1969 at the age of 14 with his father, a piano importer. He made his first solo trip four years later (funded by teaching the piano), and hasn’t looked back.

He figures he’s spent roughly one-third of his adult life living out of a 9-inch-by 22-inch-by14-inch suitcase.

Steves, 69, was recently was sidelined by a prostate cancer diagnosis. He had surgery a month ago and is waiting for the all-clear from his doctor, but is feeling good. His trip this week is the first since his diagnosis.

Though he is known primarily for his advocacy of travel, Steves is also a national spokesman for the legalization of marijuana, and was active in the promotion of state ballot measures this fall. (Several, in Florida and North and South Dakota failed, while an issue legalizing medical marijuana in Nebraska passed.)

He also prominently advocated for the election of Vice President Kamala Harris to the presidency, and used a recent trip to Berlin to underscore the point, comparing the ascent of former and future President Donald Trump to the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1930s-era Germany in several videos posted to X.

“I don’t know what it accomplished,” said Steves, circumspect after the election. “But I had to do it.”

Steves sees the election results as an opportunity to try to bridge some of the divide in the nation.

“We need to learn more about each other, I think,” he said. “I feel like it’s a new beginning in a lot of ways, to figure out a way to not be such a divided society.”

Despite his strong opinions about the election, Steves said his talk in Cleveland will not be overtly political, although he does think travel is a strong antidote to fear and nativism.

“I’m evangelical about getting people out in the world,” said Steves, who wrote “Travel as a Political Act” in 2009 to illustrate just how much travel can change one’s worldview.

“It makes my life more real and I have more colors in my palette when I am not ethnocentric and afraid,” he said.

Too much of American life, he said, is driven by fear.

“I like not being afraid,” he said. “I lament the days when people used to say bon voyage. Now, instead, we say, ‘Have a safe trip.’ It makes no sense at all. By any measure, it’s safer to travel now than when people said bon voyage.”

Travel, when done right, should be not only safe but also enlightening and educational.

He encourages all travelers to be what he calls “cultural chameleons,” and adopt some of the practices of the places they’re visiting.

“When I cross the border, I change,” said Steves. He drinks tea in England, whiskey in Scotland, red wine in Italy and ouzo in Greece.

“I don’t even like the taste of ouzo in this hemisphere, but I love a glass on a Greek island at sunset,” he said. “It feels right.”

Rick Steves in Cleveland

Tickets are still available for Steves’ talk, “Why We Travel,” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 13, at Playhouse Square’s KeyBank State Theatre. Tickets start at $40. The talk, which will include photos and stories from Steves’ decades of travel, is sponsored by Ideastream Public Media.