I frequently meet people in the US that have never left their home state. Is the same true for people living in Europe? I would expect that with high speed rail and so much more history there, that people would take advantage of traveling, especially now that passports are not required for traveling within the EU.
I’m only one data point, but I’ve travelled from the UK to France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Russia, Croatia and Serbia.
It helped that our NHS The NHS website - NHS (www.nhs.uk) used to have reciprocal agreements with many of these countries over health care.
I don’t think I know anyone who has never left their home state. Is that a regional thing?
As far as your main question, I don’t have first hand knowledge. It seems like it would be a bigger deal to travel to another country, be it ever so close by and easy to get to, than to travel to another state in the same country, for reasons of language if nothing else.
I hear of people that never leave their home city. Not because they are incurious, because they are quite unwealthy.
Here’s some data. It’s a couple of years old and it relates to EU citizens who have visited other EU countries but, still.
It seems that 37% of EU citizens have never travelled to another EU country. This varies widely from country to country — just 4% of Luxembourgers have never been to any other EU country (and, frankly, I’m surprised it’s as high as 4%, given than nowhere in Luxembourg is more than an hour’s drive from at least one other EU country) while 63% of Bulgarians have never been to another EU country. Propensity to travel is highest in rich countries with cold northern climates (Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark) and lower in poorer countries with pleasant Mediterranean climates (Greece, Portugal, Bulgaria)
I am an American who relocated my family to Europe several years ago. We’ve been very active in traveling around the continent since the move (if my finger math is correct, my kids will be seeing their 25th and 26th countries this summer), so I’ll share my perspective.
My first comment is that you cannot generalize “Europeans” like that on this kind of question. It varies widely from country to country, based on a number of factors (wealth, language, culture, and so on).
In my anecdotal experience, I have run into German and Dutch tourists around Europe probably more than any other. People in those countries generally have more comfort/familiarity with English, which is the unofficial language of tourism, so the barrier to travel is lower. My contrast, people in France are somewhat less likely to speak English with any kind of fluency; you occasionally run into a bit of a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude about their language, and a resistance to needing to learn others, which leads to the interesting fact that France is one of the most internally traveled tourist countries in Europe, similar to how it is in the US.
But if you disregard that, I would say that the high-level answer to the subject-line question is no, it’s not common for Europeans to stay within the borders of their own country, like in the US. I work at a small financial-services company, and my 30-odd co-workers come from eight or nine different countries. That’s a little on the high side, but not significantly so.
Our cleaning lady in Berlin, born in East Germany, ~50 yr. old, surprised me and my wife last week when she stated that she had never boarded a plane. She may be the first person I know who has never been abroad. But she has probably been to Poland or the Czech Republic, and be it only to buy cheap stuff. We did not ask.
Yes, boarding a plane isn’t a neccessary condition to traveling abroad. I could leave my country and visit almost any European country without ever flying.
I think I’ve met a total of one adult person who hasn’t been abroad.
I agree. I can’t think of anyone I know who’s never been abroad. Even my brother, who has never taken the plane, has been to France and Spain.
It’s so easy to cross borders, many Europeans under 50 speak at least another language with some basic proficiency, and, depending on where you live, the closest foreign country is only 1-3 hours away from yours I guess.
But they are. It depends on the Schengen accord. Ireland, Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus (EU-countries) are not inside, whereas Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland are (Not EU-countries). Only those that are within Schengen are passport free. You still have to provide some form of ID saying that you are a permanent resident in one of the 27 countries.
I very much agree with @Cervaise and I think he’s spot on.
Now there are people who have never left even their own country. Sort of. The Nordic countries ditched passports for travel between them in 1954. People living close(-ish) will have been to the neighboring country but that isn’t “going abroad.”
I’ve never been to another country.
What?
Well, I’ve been to Norway of course, but that doesn’t count.
Another German here, and I also never met a person who has never been abroad. I thought of my grandparents (all dead for at least 36 years) who never went for vacations, but the Netherlands are so close to my home and have the nearest coast that I cannot imagine that they haven’t been there at least. And then I remembered that both my grandfathers went to France, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and Russia with a travel agency called Wehrmacht…
There’s a difference between “never leaves” and “has never left”. There are plenty of people who never or rarely leave their home city - but that doesn’t mean they didn’t leave the state for a weekend 25 years ago.
OK…you get to explain to my students why I’m laughing so hard!
Nitpick: Everywhere (y)our grandfathers went was actually GERMANY, every step of the way forward! They were not abroad, they were conquering Lebensraum! Now, if they were made prisoners and ended up in Siberia the story changes… There is a Lied (The Ballad Of The Soldier’s Wife) by Bertold Brecht with Kurt Weill’s music that expresses that better than me.
(And I beg your pardon if this comes across as borderline tasteless, I hope you know how I mean it).
My maternal grandfather actually did. He only came home in 1948 and was thoroughly traumatized and always never spoke about the war.
It’s all good, I started a joke about the war.
Same here, but I think that mine came back 1953. I think, because he never talked about it either. Nobody ever did, no idea where I got that date in my mind from. But if it was so (and there is nobody left to confirm or refute it) then he must have been one of the evil ones. You know what I mean.
I know all the (few and scarce) war stories from second hand from my parents, my grandfathers never talked to me about the war. But I do know for a fact that all my grandparents weren’t nazis, my parents were old enough during the war that they have clear memories who in their families and neighborhoods were and who not. My father frankly told me that my grand uncle who used to live in the same house with us was a nazi. I know, every German family after the war claimed they had no nazis, but in the case of my family I trust them. I would have figured it out anyway if it had been the case.
I had the exact same thought when I posted that. 
I don’t know about Europe, but I just wanted to tell a couple of stories.
We once had a grad student from Newfoundland who had never, before coming to Montreal, been outside of his province, which I found astonishing. I’ll the percentage of Canadians who have never left Canada is rather low.
I had an aunt who had been born and grown up in Philly and married a man from Brooklyn and lived there. Although they visited Philly at least once a year, she told me that she gone to Manhattan exactly once in her entire life. I doubt if she had been to any state except NY, NJ, and PA.
When I was growing up, the only states I was ever in were PA and NJ. I went to NY the first time on my HS class trip. And remember, you can walk to NJ from Philly (I once did), so that hardly counts.