A ticket or receipt can tell a story from your holiday

The small tab of paper, giving details of a fish burger, chips, apple pie and some sort of drink, tells the story of an afternoon on holiday in 1984.

Travelling around Italy with my sister, it proved difficult to find a café in Venice that wasn’t either outrageously expensive or sold nothing but sweet patisseries. We ended up trailing well off the beaten track – to the point where I worried about finding our way back in the maze of alleys – when, almost on the verge of giving up, a garish neon sign ‘BURGER’ appeared. It was like spotting an oasis while lost in the desert.

While making an album of the trip on our return, I stuck the receipt for our evening meal in with the pictures, writing beside it ‘Our salvation.’ I wish I had taken a photo of the small cafe itself, but I was delirious with hunger and it was getting dark.

It’s not the only receipt I have kept from my holidays. Tickets for entry to museums, train tickets, bus tickets, receipts from shops, paper bags, napkins and matchbooks – I’ve got so many my daughters despair. Some of them are in my photo albums and notebooks, alongside pictures taken at the time. I have my ski lift pass from a school trip to Austria, I have the beautiful tickets issued for entry to the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, to see Michelangelo’s David – they are works of art in themselves – and many Paris Metro tickets.

Tickets such as these, for the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, can enhance photo albums

I have even kept small napkins from hotels and sealed, refresher sachets handed out on airlines.They are all mementoes that bring back memories. And I have so many postcards I have bought on my travels, all carefully pasted in scrapbooks in the loft.

With the advent of technology, I thought that sort of thing had all but died out, but, to my delight, it’s on its way back.

According to Hellotickets, the online platform specialising in experiences and attractions in major cities around the world, instead of documenting everything on a phone, travellers are starting to keep the small physical traces of their trip to place in albums or journals.

On TikTok and Instagram, videos about travel journaling – notebooks where travellers collect small memories and snippets from their trips – are attracting millions of views under hashtags like #traveljournal and #traveljournaling.

Hellotickets say travellers are starting to keep items such as tube tickets, postcards, museum maps, shop receipts and even sugar packets from ‘a café where you lingered longer than planned’. The latter brought a smile to my face – I am relieved it’s not just me that squirrels away such things to take home.

People are hanging on to small objects that, together, make up of the story of a trip.

“We’re seeing a real return to tangible travel memories,” says Hellotickets. “Travellers want souvenirs that feel more personal, and small everyday objects often capture the atmosphere of a moment better than a photo.”

Items that travellers no longer throw away include metro tickets, tickets for events and shows, stickers, and maps.

My dad was an avid collector of tickets; they appear in all our family holiday albums – Snowdon Mountain Railway, entry to Portmeirion in North Wales, Keswick launch on Derwentwater, cliff lifts in various seaside resorts…I could go on.

Mixed in with photographs, I think ephemera such as tickets, receipts and postcards make an album all the more interesting. Like my burger bar receipt, they can sometimes tell the story far better than pictures.