A big part of this is that there casual traveller will typically primarily interact with people who work in hospitality - hotels, restaurants, bars - for whom d

A big part of this is that there casual traveller will typically primarily interact with people who work in hospitality - hotels, restaurants, bars - for whom dealing with foreigners is a major part of the job and who will accordingly be heavily biased towards using English to any foreign customer. Saw a couple of good examples of this on holiday in Rome a few years back - one sensible, one bizarre: first a couple of Scandinavians on the table next to us in a restaurant, talking to their waiter in english, which made total sense. The bizarre one was a French group walking into another eatery and negotiating for a table of five with the maitre d using the English word "five", even though the word in French and Italian is basically the same!