In Sweden and elsewhere, a dominating trend of daily mobility has for long been one of steady growth and geographical stretching of everyday activity spaces. This study deals with individuals’ choices of activity destinations for their everyday life activities such as, e.g., service, shopping and leisure activities. The point of departure is the empirical observation that people’s travel behavior often entails them travelling further away than to the location of the nearest possible option. This apparent willingness to travel beyond the shortest possible distance may be due to, e.g., differences in attractivity and/or selective individual preferences that cannot be accommodated by the alternatives located nearby. This phenomenon – that people travel beyond a minimum level – may be interpreted within the theoretical framework of ‘excess travel’. This research attempts to measure and characterize ‘excess travel’ in the Swedish context through a comparison between individuals’ distances to potential nearest destination options, and their actual travel distances to chosen options, i.e., their observed travel behavior. The analysis draws on two complementary data sets. First, official geo-referenced register data are used to identify nearest destination options. Second, data from national travel surveys provide information on travel behavior in terms of the actual distances individuals travel to reach activity destinations. Two cross-sections (for the years 1995 and 2005) of data are analyzed in order to assess the change over time in ‘excessive’ travel behavior. In addition to the empirical analyses, the study also entails a critical and problematizing discussion of the concept of ‘excess travel’, with an emphasis on its somewhat normative connotations, and whether or not the travel under scrutiny here can really be denominated as ‘excess’(-ive).