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Notes -
But leisure travel is old, it has been an end in itself whenever conditions became stable and there was any slightly sizeable middle-to-upper class; ancient Romans travelled all through Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt for fun (and sometimes left reviews of their experiences on the historical sites). Tourists would travel to the pyramids and the ruins of Troy, motivated by the concept of otium, or "self-realisation time". Temples would derive significant portions of revenue from tourism; they charged fees, contained artefacts for sightseeing and often claimed to house some legendary figure's remains. There were tourist resorts in Baia and Naples. This isn't particularly limited to Rome either, Chinese literati engaged in landscape tourism, going to mountains to gather herbs and appreciate scenery.
I'm also not certain the "stolen valour" hypothesis works very well here to explain the cultural cachet travel currently holds. Merchants who would have travelled heavily in the course of their work were not considered particularly high-status people in many historical societies (Greece, Rome, China, early medieval Europe all considered them a disreputable, parasitic nonproducing class). A lot of times travelling becomes vaunted once it becomes a pastime that the wealthy are willing and capable of participating in, when the empire is stable and it can be portrayed as a form of self-cultivation and source of worldly enlightenment instead of a job performed by the lowly for money.
That is quite the opposite of my take. Cultural exchange has shaped societies in many novel ways over the years; it's far more often that novelty via partaking of foreign people's native mundanity results in that novelty being exported back to one's own society and syncretising in interesting and new ways. To continue with the Roman example from before, after the annexation of Egypt and significant travel there Roman Italy gained a large market for Egyptian-looking artworks and syncretic pieces of art that the well-to-do put in their homes. And while not so related to travel, the development of European chinoiserie largely was caused by coming across porcelains and textiles from China, in other words partaking in "foreign people's native mundanity", and it resulted in many new art styles such as Rococo.
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