Difference between trip and journey (un viaje):

So our Spanish students learning English online with us have trouble translating the term 'un viaje'. Should it be a 'travel', 'trip' or 'journey'? Well it certainly shouldn't be 'a travel': we don’t say ‘I am going to do a travel’. However we can say ‘I am going to do a trip/journey’ or ‘I am going on a trip/journey' when saying 'me voy de viaje'. But there is a difference between ‘trip’ and ‘journey’. ‘Journey’ normally is used to indicate the movement between point A and point B. This could be a very long ‘journey’ of several days, months or even years. For example, ‘it’s a long journey from England to Argentina’ by boat. A ‘journey’ could also be a very short distance like your commute to work. For instance, we can say ‘my journey to work takes me just 10 minutes’. A weekend in Rome is composed of journeys (for example, the movement from your house to arrival at your hotel), but the whole experience is a trip. So, we normally would use ‘trip’ as a countable noun when the travel is not just a movement from point A to point B but includes activities like eating or meetings and/or sleeping. So ‘trip’ has the sense that the person would be staying in a place a certain amount of time. It is the whole experience of being away. Remember, travel is normally a verb (except terms like luxury travel or business travel) so if you don’t use it as a verb you must be very careful. The instances when you can use travel as a noun is when there is an adjective before it as in ‘luxury travel’ or ‘business travel’ or ‘OAP (old aged pensioner) travel’, for example. http://www.clasesinglesonline.com/