In the inaugural edition of this newsletter, I challenged readers to change their mindset in this new era of overtourism. “What shouldn’t I do?” is now just as important as asking “What should I do?” when planning. I cannot stress how vital this is, and a great example of this is Santorini.
I can’t think of any place I want to be less than Santorini in the summer. I’d honestly rather be in Death Valley. Sure, the views across the caldera at sunset are magnificent, and there are some nice hotels where, if you only look directly out of your villa, you can forget you’re in a human zoo.
But step outside from sunrise until just after sunset and onto those streets and it’s a melee of cruise day-trippers, influencers-in-the-wild-style photoshoots right and left, and roller bags. The beaches aren’t even nice (damn that black sand is hot!). A staggering 3.4 million people visited Santorini last year, and the number is expected to be higher in 2024. It’s reached a boiling point for Greeks, as recounted in both these CNN and Reuters stories. (CNN’s headline is great: ‘Worst season ever’: How things got ugly on Greece’s ‘Instagram island.’)
Now, we’ll see what happens with the proposed cap on cruise daytrippers next year. But I’m going to say something a bit harsh. You’re going to Santorini to get a photo of the white houses and blue domes overlooking the caldera–which means you’re essentially paying to have the exact same photos as the worst sort of tourists you’d never actually want to be associated with.
In fact, in still traveling for this purpose in 2024, you are said tourist.
Anyways, next week we’ll be back with a fun feature on one of New England’s greatest treasures.
DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES
I was a longtime, loyal customer of Hotels.com. I’m still a platinum member, but for every trip I’ve been planning over the last few months I’ve found myself looking to book directly with hotels just as often as on Hotels.com. You see, a year ago it tossed its beloved rewards program (10% of your hotel room rate before fees and taxes went into a reward you could redeem after completing ten nights) for One Key, which also included rewards across sister companies Expedia and Vrbo.
Overnight, with One Key, bookings on Hotels.com netted you a mere handful of dollars in rewards. The benefits of using them across Vrbo and Expedia are limited (Vrbo just doesn’t have the biggest selection, I’ve never liked Expedia’s interface, and in many countries only one of the companies is useful). Every time I would see a booking costing four figures on Hotels.com netting me something like $12 in rewards felt miserly. I totally understand needing to rein in costs in a higher-interest rate environment, but the drop in value is reportedly 80%! Well, it turns out it’s been such a disaster for Hotels.com that Expedia Group is halting its rollout worldwide (unfortunately customers in the UK got saddled with it a couple months ago before the company made this decision).
The news also comes shortly after Expedia Group introduced a One Key rewards card with Wells Fargo. What’s funny is that if you’re the highest status (i.e. platinum) the card’s best perk is earning 9% in rewards, which is … still less than the previous Hotels.com rewards program of 10% regardless of status!!
One final note on Expedia. In July, California rolled out its new rule requiring companies to disclose hidden fees. In its recent earnings call, Expedia said complying with this rule had a negative effect on their bookings. I’m sorry, but if your business success requires deceiving consumers then I think maybe you need to rethink your strategy…
If you haven’t read the swan song of longtime New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, stop everything you’re doing (including reading this newsletter) and read it now. Our obsession with convenience in the U.S. (this, more than anything, defines modern American culture in my opinion) has led to a slow deterioration in what Wells saw as one of the last true forms of human interaction–dining out. Maybe it reads to some of you as a silly luddite-esque lamentation, but I read it as Cassandra-like. Few are going to listen, a friction-less life is just too pleasant. But I think he’s right that we’re constantly giving up to much in this pursuit. I also have found myself returning constantly to this passage for the past week, because he nails something I haven’t been able to articulate about tasting menu-driven Michelin star restaurants which I often loathe:
A few of these places are wonderfully personal and idiosyncratic, but many of them feel utterly interchangeable — they follow the same template, down to the signed menu you’re given as you leave, as if you were going to run right home and paste it in your scrapbook.
You sit there having the same experience everybody else is having. (People are so afraid of missing out that they’ll ask the server what’s the right way to eat each dish.) If it’s your birthday — and on a typical night in one of these places, half the customers seem to be celebrating one — you’ll get the same dessert everybody else is having, with a candle stuck in it.
Even the Cheesecake Factory gives you a free slice of cake on your birthday. But the Cheesecake Factory wants you to come back; a lot of tasting-menu restaurants assume, correctly, that almost nobody sitting at the counter is going to become a regular. These places are built for one-night flings, not long-term relationships. They’re hookup restaurants.
Maybe I’m getting old-er, but I would trade any of the regimented, charade-filled, impersonable meals I’ve had at some of the world’s best restaurants for my monthly lunch I do with one of my favorite reporters at Annie’s, an old steakhouse that’s been serving comfort food here in D.C. for years where you’ll probably get a waiter with a bit of lip who plops a heavy pour down with a wink.
A number of people, myself included, last week (lightly) dragged Emirates for their new business class offering. I’m sure the experience is lovely, but it isn’t that drastically different from what they had before or what is available elsewhere. So they sort of self-owned by calling it “raising the industry benchmark when it comes to premium travel.” It does make you wonder, though, if we’ve reached a point where there isn’t much room to do anything revolutionary on the experience inside the plane, and so things are just going to start to get gimmicky. (All these collabs the airlines are doing with brands often seem like big reaches in terms of what people care about.)
I don’t think I’ve read a positive piece about Disney Theme Parks in a very long time. On quality and creativity, theme park fans I talk to always rave about Universal Studios and are down on Disney. And that’s without considering value–the sums families are expected to spend are positively eye-watering. The only comparison I’ve been able to think of is the cost of skiing and how absurd that has gotten here in the U.S. (Both Disney and skiing should be examples in a larger piece about how extortionary prices in the U.S. are deflating domestic tourism numbers.) So it’s apt that in this New York TImes piece about whether Disney theme parks are worth the price, the author asks whether fans of Epcot should just go to Europe instead, as that will cost less. It turns out, that’s already happening. A downturn in spending at theme parks in the U.S. is in part because Americans would rather go to Europe.
“Other travel options, including cruises and international tourism given the strength of the dollar, have experienced their own surge in demand, which cause visitation rates at our parks to normalize,” said the president of Comcast (which owns Universal), Mike Cavanagh.
Disney put on a big show recently to unveil all the exciting additions in the pipeline to their parks, but I just don’t see how they can compete with literally going to Europe unless their prices come down.
I’m a big self-driving cars skeptic, so I giggled a little extra when I saw the story this week about residents of San Francisco being kept up because Waymo (the leader in the city for self-driving taxis) cars keep beeping at each other in a parking lot in the middle of a night trying to navigate it. Years ago Peter Thiel made the argument that almost all the huge advances in our lives have been limited to computers and phones. If you were to sit in your room and remove the screens, there would be little that is different (except stylistically) from 40 or 50 years ago. The same largely goes for the built environment. I don’t see AI taking over our lives if we can’t even get automated grocery checkout machines to work without attendants.
Few companies get dragged as hard as AirBnB does on Twitter. People hate the often outrageous fees, all the rules you have to follow before checking out, intrusive hosts, neighborhoods hollowed out by rental hustle, and scam apartments. And usually when there’s a pile-on I start to sympathize. But I remain unimpressed with AirBnB’s attempts to stimulate interest amid declining profits and stock price.
Their latest ideas? Bring back “Experiences” which was the ability to book tours through the site. (Although, CEO Brian Chesky seems to be more aware than other travel CEOs by noting the tours need to be “more affordable.”) It’s also introducing “Co-hosting” where people who have spaces to rent out but don’t feel like being a host can combine with people who don’t have a place to rent out but want to manage a property. This sounds to me like classic tech-speak for an existing business model (management companies) and just an attempt from AirBnB to get its hands on existing business that its highest producing hosts already have–which seems likely to backfire.
TRAVEL INDUSTRY NEWS
TikTok Trends data says these are Gen Z’s most sought-after destinations
The new Portland Airport terminal looks pretty fabulous. Loved reading about it in Ned Russell’s newsletter
Call Me By Your Name and Challengers director Luca Guadagnino’s hotel project Palazzo Talìa has opened in Rome
USA Today readers think this is the best hiking trail in America
North Korea will be resuming international tourism in December
Superyacht sinks off Greek island after crew member ‘forgot to close door’