Food, language, and the art of belonging
The wristband goes on at check-in. Snap, and that's it: for the next seven nights you are cashless, borderless, and functionally sealed off from the country whose name is on your boarding pass. Somewhere past the lobby in Punta Cana, or Cancun, or Montego Bay, a bartender is...
Here's a claim the travel industry would rather you didn't consider: the most expensive way to move through a country is often the loneliest way. You can spend four hundred euros a night in a Relais & Châteaux property outside Siena and never speak to a single person who...
--- "The travel industry has spent decades selling Indigenous culture as scenery, a backdrop for adventure, a photo opportunity, a story to tell at dinner. That needs to stop." Travel marketing's appropriation of Native American heritage as aesthetic commodity does real harm to...
--- "Selling access to someone else's grief is still extraction, no matter how tasteful the brochure design or how high the thread count at the hotel down the road." The luxury travel industry has discovered that suffering, tragedy, and death make compelling products, and is...
--- "When a festival gets expensive enough to keep locals out, it's no longer a local festival; it's a theme park with better costumes." The luxury travel industry has systematically converted living communal traditions into staged, priced, and photographed spectacles that...