This shouldn’t be news to anyone by now, but tourism and hospitality stand to be the worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and, to add injury to injury, probably face the slowest recovery. All accommodations with the exception of the most robust hotel chains will hear a near-death rattle at…

tl:dr – If you work in travel and tourism, and are younger than 50, these issues are going to affect you sooner or later. You’re going to want to be proactive, not reactive, if you want any hope of your business/destination surviving and maintaining a career in this industry until…

tl:dr The numerous flaws in TripAdvisor and Booking hotel reviews are dizzying and likely beyond rescue. I’ll preface this post by saying that I have no new hard evidence to present here. There’s no conclusive DNA test, no bloody murder weapon, and no one caught red-handed with 12 kilos of…

tl:dr It’s bad, getting much worse, and it’s going to dramatically change tourism, but ultimately tourism is not the problem and it’s long past time the industry demanded change. I’ve been suffering some weapons grade cognitive dissonance about air travel for tourism for quite a while now. At this stage,…

I’ll just leave this here. BUY THE BOOK!

[You know about Long Reads, right? Well, this is the Longest Read – in the history of my blog. From my travelogue archives, an edited and re-mastered account of my 78 hour bus ride from southwest Spain to northeast Romania in June 2004.] The build up Some travel elitists will…

[Disclaimer: This might not be the worst hostel in Europe. I can’t be sure since I haven’t stayed at every hostel in Europe. But it was without question a strong contender when I stayed here in October 2003 and, as with any situation involving unusual discomfort and personal injustice, it…

Disclosure: That even on my best day, my book reviewing skills are amateurish notwithstanding, I am good friends with Doug and have therefore opted to skip doing a book review in favor of an only sporadically serious interview on his travels and scoring his first book, Europe on 5 Wrong…

UPDATE: August 10, 2012 – Digiboo is introducing a wireless download feature from their kiosks, eliminating the need for the flash drive transfer. As of this writing, kiosks are in the Minneapolis/St Paul, Seattle and Portland airports. Recently, for maybe the third or fourth time since they cured polio, I…

“What are the worst travel scams you’ve fallen for?” Doug Mack asked me during the second round of drinks at a recent “meeting.” The soon-to-be-published travel author had just returned from a trip to Havana, Cuba, where he and his girlfriend had been victim to the “I meant that’s the…