Bringing Back Tradition in Travel; My Favorite 'Airline' Gets a Rewards Program

Plus, a new Aman, rich people blaming Instagram for crap luxury travel, disappointing LACMA addition, and Hertz AI disaster

Jul 13, 2025

If somebody called me up right now and said, “I’ve got the plane ready to go, we’ll pick you up and let’s head to Europe,” my answer would be no.

That’s how deeply content I've gotten just to spend summer with family and old friends in Newport. And how extreme my reluctance to jam-pack my calendar with travel has become.

Don’t misunderstand me. My friends currently cavorting about in the Balearics or the Greek islands look like they’re having a blast. But watching all their videos jetting around the Med and capitals of Europe, I mostly feel … exhausted?

I just have little desire to fly that far and go through significant time changes. I hit a wall a couple of years ago, where nonstop travel slowly lost its appeal. Places started to blur. I often found myself noticing things repeating as much as things being different. And my body began to rebel.

Maybe it’s all a part of getting older (so if you are an older reader, forgive me for stating something obvious and verging on cliche), but I’ve started to rejigger my travel calendar. Sure, there are still the big trips to places I’ve never been. This year, that’s been the Amazon and Uzbekistan, and likely South Korea in late fall. Higher in importance has become travel focused on seeing friends. If I’ve made it to London, Mexico City, Paris, or Madrid, it’s because of them, not some desire to see more of these places. As much as I love those cities.

But highest in importance, and the travel I look forward to the most, are the trips that have become tradition with my family and friends.

It’s neatly broken up into one for each season. Over Christmas and New Year's, that's Tucson, a city in southern Arizona which I’ve fallen madly in love with for its natural beauty, rich culture, and our family ties. Our time there is mostly spent doing nothing, peppered in with hikes we now know well and specific holiday parties we always attend.

In summer, it’s Newport, where I’m from, and the perfect seaside town to be a kid, an adult, or something in between. We have our routine down, even to the exact same swim and beach walk every single night. Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I don’t travel, and instead, my friends and some of my family come to me. We’ve had to add folding tables and are beginning to stretch from the dining room into the sitting room–a seating conundrum that secretly brings me great joy. I get to take them into my routine in D.C., and now have traditions like skating at the rink by the National Archives on its first day of the season.

And in spring for Passover/Easter break, we have made Tampa/St. Pete our spot. It’s a place that runs counter to so much of my natural inclinations, and yet I’ve become charmed by it.

As this whole new mentality around travel has settled into place in my brain, I’ve spent time thinking about why. Why are we (and by we, I mean younger Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z) in such a frenzy about traveling as much as we can? Part of it might just be that we can–if you can have Europe and most of the world as your playground, why wouldn’t you? Some of it, I’d guess, is a reaction to previous generations of Americans who didn’t leave the country very much and whose worldviews and attitudes did not match our own. Part of it is also that many of us don’t want kids or at least not until much later than our parents or grandparents did.

But this zeal for constant travel is not, for lack of a better word, normal. I’ve given up trying to figure out how all these people in college and in their 20s and 30s are financing these trips. But nobody I knew growing up was traveling all the time, and certainly not crossing oceans. Not at the sort of middle-class Catholic day school where I went K-8, nor at the New England boarding school I went to for high school. Not even at Georgetown. Spring break was for Florida and the Caribbean, and summer was for a summer job or sweating it out at an internship in New York.

As a kid, I always looked forward to a certain hike we’d do in Vermont in summer, planning to be first up the mountain but dreading the icy pond dip after. Now, I love tradition because I find anticipatory pleasure in counting down the days until it’s the first time of the summer we’re jumping off Beacon Rock or popping down to the U.S.-Mexico border for antique shopping at Holler & Saunders.

There’s also the obvious pleasure of spending time with friends and family, especially as it adds new generations. It’s a way of ensuring I get as much time as I can with those I love. I doubt I’ll be on my deathbed wishing I’d met more people, but I dread being the cliche who wishes he’d spent more time with loved ones.

But the main reason I’ve come to love tradition in travel is the lack of pressure. When I’m in Tucson, there might be a trail I haven’t done that I’ll get around to or a new restaurant, but I don’t feel pressed to do anything. I’ve done most of it. The same goes for Newport and the Tampa area.

And I’ve found that far more freeing than having the world a plane ride away.

My Newport and Tuscon guides :)

DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES

The biggest news this week in the travel world was probably the official falling out between Wells Fargo and BILT, the popular travel rewards credit card. BILT customers got a propaganda-heavy email from the company’s founder, Ankur Jain, about valuations and the new cards with Cardless. However, this has been coming for a year now, after the Wall Street Journal reported last June that Wells Fargo was losing up to $10 million a month on the card. Now, the paper reports that Wells Fargo could stomach the losses no longer, and the upsides hadn’t materialized. What does this mean for consumers? Well, I predicted a few months ago that BILT was walking softly towards a card with fees, and that’s exactly what Jain announced in the email: “premium cards featuring $95 and $495 annual fees.” While there will still be a no-fee card, I can’t imagine it will be terribly lucrative. The era of Americans getting lots of stuff just for taking part is over.

The numbers for travel to the U.S. are abysmal. Visits to the U.S. in June this year are down three percent from last year, and so far this year just 80 percent of 2019 levels! Even worse, Canadians are sticking to their guns as travel from Canada in June was down 33 percent from last year.

Count me out on renting from Hertz any time soon. I am still unconvinced of the wonders of what we’ve all agreed to call AI. So it’s no surprise to me that the company using an AI program to detect damage on your rental return has led to customer fury. The Drive documents one of its reader’s infuriating cases, which includes a Kafkaesque attempt to get it rectified by an actual human. And in a statement to both The Drive and The New York Post, the company says it has no plans to change.

I love JSX, the semi-private carrier that mostly flies out west. It’s so well run, and I’ll always happily pay extra to fly it, as you only have to roll up like 20 minutes before, and your trips depart and arrive at private air hangars. So I’m ecstatic that it’s introducing a rewards program, and even more ecstatic that it’s a very simple one. Chris Dong wrote it up in AFAR, and details that, “All passengers receive 5 percent back as future flight credit on a ticket’s base fare, along with seat and pet fees. Travelers can pool rewards with up to five people, allowing for more flexibility when redeeming. However, flight credits expire after a 12-month period.” The company will also reportedly be announcing some more routes, so fingers crossed they’re on ones I use!

While I don’t agree with his sartorial suggestion (if I’ve paid for business, I’m wearing what makes me comfortable!) I did enjoy most of William Hanson’s rules for flying business. (Hanson does those viral videos about the proper ways to behave. Some are serious, some are clearly a joke, like the banana one.) I particularly liked calling for some discretion when taking photos. If anybody would be impressed by your post that not-so-casually shows you flying business, they’re probably not somebody you want to impress. But I must confess that I do feel shame about violating his fourth rule, “Complimentary does not mean the Last Supper,” as I do pig out just because I can.

At first glance, the EU regulating hand luggage rules seems like a good thing. Airlines do abuse this source of ancillary revenue. The new rule would allow passengers to bring one cabin bag measuring up to 100 centimeters, and a personal item up to 40 x 30 x 15 centimeters. But there are hidden benefits to the current state of things. The first is boarding and deplaning times. The more carry-on luggage there is, the longer this takes. The second is that if airlines lose revenue from charging for baggage, they’re going to make up for it elsewhere. So, just hope that it isn’t on parts of the experience you care about!

Early images of the David Geffen Galleries

Feeling lukewarm to downright antipathy about the just-revealed Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. It feels like suburban office park meets rehab facility meets unfinished billionaire beach villa? When will this era of art only being displayed in cold halls on concrete slabs end?! Maybe this is that aesthetic’s last gasp.

This Curbed article on what went into the restoration of the Waldorf Astoria is pretty cool. Especially fascinating is the concept of what is historically accurate for such a storied place. Which era is technically the historic one?

And the steady drip of unhappiness with Airbnb’s new Experiences and Services programs continues. This time, it’s the hosts who are pissed, as not only do they not get a cut from Airbnb when these services like a private chef are offered in their properties, but they aren’t even notified.

Snohetta’s Shanghai Opera House is nearing completion:

I had never heard of SpareFare until reading this Mark Ellwood piece in the Wall Street Journal. “Founded in 2016, this eBay-like marketplace pairs unfortunate travelers looking to sell nonrefundable trips, flights, and hotel nights they can’t use to bargain hunters,” writes Ellwood. Have any of you ever used it?

“It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me” has never felt more apt than reading through the results of a survey of luxury American travelers. Their issues with where luxury travel currently is–”Sixty-eight percent agreed that hotel design has become too focused on being ‘Instagram ready’ and 62 percent agreed that luxury hotels ‘feel beige lately,’ with social-media-driven designs ‘making everything look and feel the same.’--are their fault! Nobody is catered to more than luxury travelers, so maybe if they want less beige and monastic Instagram look, they should stop staying at certain brands they very much will not stop staying at!

Good to see folks catching on that politics aren’t the only reason domestic tourism in the U.S. is slumping right now. Everything is fees and inflated prices, and you constantly feel like you’re getting scammed. That, at least, is what local experts say is a big part of Vegas’s downturn.

Great that TSA got rid of the shoe removal requirement, hopefully they’ll start to move on the liquid limits…