Travel vs. journey vs. trip

TRAVEL/ TRAVELLING (nouns) Travel is the general term to describe going from one place to another. We can talk about someone's travels to refer to the journeys he makes: His travels abroad provided lots of background material for novels he wrote. Travelling is also a general term which refers to the activity of travel: Travelling by boat between the islands is less tiring than travelling by road. I don't do as much travelling as I used to now that I'm retired. Travel often crops up as part of compound nouns. Compare the following: Make sure you keep all your travel documents safely. You can obtain your travel tickets from the travel agents in the High Street if you don't want to order them over the Internet. Some of you may suffer from travel sickness. Air travel may well give you a bumpy ride. If you don't have a credit or debit card, make sure you take plenty of traveller's cheques with you.

JOURNEY (noun) A journey is one single piece of travel. You make journeys when you travel from one place to another. (Note that the plural is spelt journeys, not journies): The journey from London to Newcastle by train can now be completed in under three hours. We can talk about journeys taking or lasting a long time: How long did your journey take? ~ Oh, it lasted for ever. We stopped at every small station. TRIP (noun) A trip usually involves more than one single journey. We talk about day trips, round trips and business trips. We make journeys usually, but we go on trips: I went on a day trip to France. We left at 6.30 in the morning and returned before midnight the same day. The round-trip ticket enabled me to visit all the major tourist destinations in India. Where's Laurie? ~ He won't be in this week. He's gone on a business trip to Malaysia and Singapore. The trip went well. It was an old car, but we didn't break down in four weeks of travelling