ATHLLC6995605671

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00:01:34.640 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of all the hacks, a show about upgrading

00:01:41.080 | your life, money, and travel.

00:01:42.960 | I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am excited to have you here today because I'm talking

00:01:47.240 | with one of the most well-traveled people I've ever met, Brandon Presser.

00:01:51.360 | He's an award-winning travel journalist who's been to 130 countries.

00:01:55.840 | He's written over 50 guidebooks.

00:01:57.840 | He regularly contributes to Condé Nast Traveler in Bloomberg and hosted the

00:02:02.640 | Bravo Television Series Tour Group.

00:02:04.800 | But most recently he released his latest book, The Far Land, and it is a crazy

00:02:10.440 | true story about 200 years of murder, mania, and mutiny in the South Pacific.

00:02:16.280 | It's definitely worth a read.

00:02:18.240 | In our conversation, I'm going to try my best to pull out all the

00:02:22.760 | travel tips and hacks I can.

00:02:25.240 | We'll talk about planning a trip, where to stay, having authentic experiences,

00:02:29.840 | how best to use reviews and guidebooks, why the type of Q-tip a hotel has matters.

00:02:36.200 | And we'll get his take on the best places you can go for your next trip,

00:02:40.680 | including a few unexpected ones.

00:02:43.120 | Brandon has traveled so much.

00:02:44.920 | I don't know how we're going to get into all of this before we run out of

00:02:47.560 | time, but I will try my best.

00:02:49.320 | Let's jump in.

00:02:50.560 | Brandon, thank you so much for being here.

00:02:54.360 | Thanks so much for having me.

00:02:55.400 | Yeah, I am really excited for this conversation.

00:02:58.240 | And I want to jump right in and just ask, what do you think most people

00:03:01.920 | get wrong about the way they travel?

00:03:03.880 | Man, big question.

00:03:06.400 | Over the last 10 years, as we've seen social media really ramp up, we see that

00:03:11.200 | everyone can post all their experiences and find experiences to covet on Instagram.

00:03:17.240 | Travel has become a bit of a performance for a lot of people.

00:03:20.040 | Look at me in this place.

00:03:22.080 | And I think that's the biggest pitfall that people make, because if you're

00:03:25.400 | seeing travel as a commodity or as you performing in that space, you're not

00:03:30.560 | actually engaging in that destination.

00:03:32.880 | And so if someone were thinking about how to spend an upcoming trip, they were

00:03:38.320 | like, "You know what?

00:03:38.840 | I'm going to take a week off in the fall."

00:03:40.480 | What would you tell them to start doing even before they know where they're

00:03:44.440 | going to have the right kind of trip?

00:03:48.400 | I think the biggest mistake that people make, but when they're about to travel

00:03:52.920 | is they pick a place and not a reason.

00:03:56.040 | So I would start your trip planning by thinking about what you want to get out

00:04:01.360 | of that trip and then find a shortlist of destinations and marry that shortlist

00:04:07.120 | to the purpose of your travel.

00:04:09.920 | So I want to go to Italy might end up being a hollow experience because the

00:04:16.040 | thing that you actually want to get out of the trip is going to a place where

00:04:20.640 | there's not a lot of other tourists or going to a place where you really want

00:04:24.960 | to have an experience where you're meeting people, making new friendships

00:04:28.280 | that might not happen for you in a one week trip there.

00:04:32.120 | And if it would, it probably might not happen in the place that you might by

00:04:36.360 | default go.

00:04:37.000 | You're like, "I'm going to go to Rome and meet people."

00:04:38.800 | That might not be the easiest spot to kind of blend in.

00:04:41.720 | Exactly.

00:04:42.760 | There's nothing wrong with having your bucket list and hearing about a trip

00:04:46.560 | that someone else took and wanting to go there too.

00:04:48.440 | You know, word of mouth is the most powerful tool in travel.

00:04:51.920 | But if you're just sitting down to say, "I have a week in September and I want

00:04:57.200 | to fill it," start with how you want to fill it, not where.

00:05:00.400 | And do you have some examples of things to kind of inspire people about how they

00:05:04.840 | could fill it?

00:05:05.440 | Yeah, I would start with something like, is it a trip where you want to expend a

00:05:09.760 | lot of energy?

00:05:10.360 | Do you want it to be a really active trip?

00:05:12.040 | Do you want it to be physically active, socially active?

00:05:14.280 | Or are you on super burnout and you need a place where you don't want to talk to

00:05:19.560 | other people and you just want to be on a beach, in a cabin, on a mountain, in the

00:05:24.400 | desert?

00:05:24.880 | Think about that first.

00:05:26.120 | Is this going to be like a big social and physical spend?

00:05:29.400 | Or is this like a reboot?

00:05:31.200 | And a trip can be both too.

00:05:33.800 | Just put the big spend first and put the reboot second so that you come home

00:05:38.120 | fresh.

00:05:38.800 | I like it.

00:05:39.880 | Why do you love travel?

00:05:40.960 | I mean, you've done a ton of traveling, but you haven't hit the whole world, but

00:05:44.720 | you're closer than most.

00:05:45.960 | I'm working my way through.

00:05:48.080 | I was the kid that would ask my parents for a trip when they were like, "What do

00:05:53.200 | you want for your birthday?"

00:05:54.240 | I didn't want a toy.

00:05:55.240 | I wanted a trip.

00:05:56.200 | And I was a kid who had no attention for reading.

00:06:00.080 | All I wanted to do was look at atlases.

00:06:02.360 | I think I've had this very ADD brain for years that finds something super

00:06:07.560 | interesting, jumps on it, learns everything there is to know about that

00:06:11.360 | thing, and then jumps to the next thing.

00:06:13.600 | And travel has been the only industry in space that has allowed me to let my ADD

00:06:20.720 | free.

00:06:21.280 | I'm obsessed with learning things about different cultures.

00:06:24.240 | I think through travel, you ultimately learn a lot more about yourself.

00:06:27.920 | And so for me, it's about seeing the world in an ordinary way.

00:06:35.640 | I want to go to places and see what the everyday life is for someone there.

00:06:38.880 | I don't need to check off the Taj Mahal or the Sydney Opera House off of a list.

00:06:44.040 | I just want to see how other people are experiencing the world, how other

00:06:48.680 | people's minds work, what motivates people, what are people's hopes and

00:06:52.520 | dreams, what do we have in common, and what are our differences?

00:06:55.840 | So that seems like a great goal.

00:06:59.000 | And I feel like the more you travel in general, the more you're able to

00:07:02.520 | appreciate that.

00:07:03.600 | How would you go about making a meaningful itinerary for a trip?

00:07:07.280 | We've come so far away from checklist travel, especially in the American media.

00:07:13.440 | It's like, "Oh, don't go to the Louvre.

00:07:15.280 | Don't go to the Taj Mahal."

00:07:16.400 | It's okay if you want to see them.

00:07:18.400 | Go see them and have a look if that's part of your motivation.

00:07:21.520 | But I think what you need to be thinking about as well is that it's okay not to

00:07:28.040 | have everything figured out and not have everything structured.

00:07:31.680 | I've talked to people who've not been to destinations that they're about to go

00:07:34.880 | to, and they're really excited for the trip because at 8 a.m.

00:07:37.480 | they're doing this, and at 9 a.m.

00:07:38.880 | they're doing that, 10 a.m.

00:07:40.160 | they have this planned, 11 a.m.

00:07:41.240 | they have this planned, and it's this whole list of checklist travel in a

00:07:45.120 | different way.

00:07:45.720 | We think of checklist travel as going to see the big ticket, but then people are

00:07:49.520 | like, "I have my food experience, and I have my museum experience, and I have it

00:07:52.960 | all lined up."

00:07:53.720 | And the best thing about travel and the thing that you will talk about to your

00:07:58.400 | friends when you get back, I guarantee, is not on that list before you travel.

00:08:03.600 | It's the moment of serendipity where you're at a restaurant, and you hit it

00:08:08.400 | off with the waiter, and you all go somewhere after, and you're in this cool

00:08:14.080 | place that you never thought you would be, meeting people that you never thought

00:08:16.800 | you would meet, and you connect on Instagram afterwards, and you stay in

00:08:20.200 | touch.

00:08:20.600 | You need to let your trip breathe because if you're too planned out, you're not

00:08:27.240 | actually piercing the veneer, the tourism veneer.

00:08:32.480 | Are there any great examples from your many travels of letting that happen and

00:08:38.720 | what unfolded?

00:08:39.640 | Yeah, I was on a surf trip in Northern Norway, and it was a great experience

00:08:46.840 | because I got to meet a lot of other people.

00:08:49.640 | I was traveling by myself, and we were all doing the surf camp together, so it

00:08:53.000 | was like instant friends, and then I tacked on a few days in Oslo at the end

00:08:57.240 | just on my own, kind of snooping around, and I went to this restaurant, and I was

00:09:01.720 | just eating by myself, and I was looking over to these people my age that were

00:09:05.560 | sitting next to me, and I just turned to them, and I was like, "What are you guys

00:09:09.000 | up to?"

00:09:09.480 | They just seemed like a group of fun friends, and they're like, "Oh, we're

00:09:12.440 | going to sing karaoke after this."

00:09:13.960 | We ended up staying out all night.

00:09:16.000 | I had a 7 a.m. flight the next morning, and they were like, "Go get your stuff.

00:09:19.880 | Just leave it at my apartment.

00:09:21.000 | We're going to go out all night."

00:09:22.240 | And we sang karaoke.

00:09:23.840 | We went to these bars that I didn't even know existed that were open all night

00:09:29.080 | long after parties.

00:09:30.400 | It doesn't always have to be a party either, but it was just such an

00:09:33.440 | unexpected experience.

00:09:34.560 | I had my built-in friends in northern Norway for the surf camp, but yet the

00:09:39.120 | people that I stay in touch with are actually these random people I met in a

00:09:42.880 | Vietnamese restaurant in Oslo.

00:09:45.520 | And do you think there's something aside from just leaving space in the

00:09:50.480 | itinerary or leaving time open that you can do to help make sure experiences

00:09:56.240 | like that have a higher chance of happening?

00:09:58.000 | Yeah.

00:09:59.120 | I think solo travel, you have a lot of energy pointed outward.

00:10:03.600 | You're curious.

00:10:04.480 | You're by yourself.

00:10:05.440 | You're more open to having someone come up to you and talk to you.

00:10:09.360 | If you're by yourself on the street, that's usually when someone's like, "Hey,

00:10:12.240 | I need help with directions to this."

00:10:14.480 | Keeping that energy open, I know it sounds a little bit hooey, but that's

00:10:17.920 | part of it.

00:10:18.640 | Also, because we live so much on our phones, it's really jarring to actually

00:10:23.200 | go up and talk to someone.

00:10:24.960 | But it's become jarring in a good way at this point where people are like, "Oh,

00:10:28.160 | you want to ask me a question?

00:10:29.120 | Sure."

00:10:29.680 | Strike up a conversation.

00:10:30.960 | I think one of the things that I'm always thinking about is generosity.

00:10:35.920 | When you go to a destination, you come back with stories where you're like, "Oh,

00:10:40.480 | this family, I met them and they invited me into their house."

00:10:43.520 | Or you can get these Airbnb experiences of going into people's homes and cooking

00:10:49.520 | with them or whatever it is.

00:10:51.520 | I think if we think about it in the opposite way, how can we be generous to the

00:10:55.840 | people that we're visiting?

00:10:57.360 | I think that you also garner a lot of goodwill in that regard as well.

00:11:01.440 | Can you give me an example of being generous while visiting?

00:11:05.360 | Sure.

00:11:06.480 | I always pack little gifts for people that I've not yet met.

00:11:10.720 | It's like a little something from home, like a candy.

00:11:13.600 | We all have this sentimental feeling about the candy that we grew up with.

00:11:18.480 | I grew up in Canada and there's candy in Canada that you can't get in the US.

00:11:21.840 | Candy from where you're from is a really fun thing to exchange with people because

00:11:26.000 | it's oddly personal.

00:11:27.760 | Stuff from where you live, even like a cool postcard.

00:11:31.840 | I often bring little blank business cards with me.

00:11:36.080 | And if I meet someone really cool, I'll write them a note and leave my email address.

00:11:40.720 | And you can control the message that way.

00:11:42.400 | You can leave them a phone number for WhatsApp if you want to hear from them a lot or

00:11:46.400 | Instagram if you want to hear from the West.

00:11:49.120 | But doing things analog, it shocks the system and it starts inspiring devotion.

00:11:55.440 | I think back to a trip I took to Syria, where almost everyone seemed to want to invite you

00:12:01.200 | into their home.

00:12:02.160 | I will say my wife and I were traveling together, and so it's not just a solo traveler thing.

00:12:06.880 | And sometimes people can be a little put at ease by having two people.

00:12:11.040 | They're like, "Oh, this isn't a random dude on the street.

00:12:13.520 | It's a couple.

00:12:14.080 | I can trust them and invite them over."

00:12:15.920 | We had all kinds of experiences.

00:12:18.000 | For some reason, when I was like, "Oh, I guess if I'm paying to go to someone's house, does

00:12:22.320 | it feel less authentic?

00:12:23.760 | Is it like the commercialized version of it?"

00:12:26.080 | How do you think about trying to make those experiences happen naturally versus maybe

00:12:31.440 | saving the time and buying the serendipity?

00:12:33.680 | Yeah, that's the catch-22, right?

00:12:37.200 | I've had guides that I've hired to do mountain climbing or to visit a city, and I have struck

00:12:44.880 | up genuine friendships with those guides.

00:12:46.800 | So I suppose it's not that different than hiring someone is essentially what it is to

00:12:53.360 | be invited into their house and to cook with them or to learn something from them.

00:12:57.040 | It's an opportunity to connect with someone.

00:13:00.320 | It's just a shame that it has to be so transactional.

00:13:03.120 | I don't think that there's necessarily a way to have magic happen or have serendipity happen

00:13:12.560 | if you're trying too hard.

00:13:13.760 | One of the things that I'll try to do that feels like a little bit more unscripted is

00:13:18.640 | try to find a run club in a city that I'm going to.

00:13:22.160 | And usually, those are free.

00:13:24.160 | Usually, they're on weekends.

00:13:26.960 | And that's always a good opportunity because at least you have something in common from

00:13:32.320 | the start.

00:13:32.960 | You both like to run.

00:13:34.080 | And then often, you need to refuel after your run.

00:13:37.600 | So maybe there's an invite with the person, people that you were with to go for brunch

00:13:42.960 | after an early morning run.

00:13:44.320 | I would start there.

00:13:45.280 | I would start with something that feels true to you, a passion point of yours, and bridge

00:13:51.520 | a more organic relationship with someone because you share something that you like.

00:13:56.320 | We were in Sweden.

00:13:57.760 | And evidently, there's a lot of gamers in Sweden.

00:14:00.560 | And we walked by a store that had every board game.

00:14:03.280 | And I couldn't help but think, "My wife and I love board games."

00:14:05.840 | We didn't actually have time that day.

00:14:07.760 | But your example of a run club could be going to some board game night at a board game store

00:14:13.840 | or whatever your hobby is.

00:14:15.600 | I bet there is a group of people that partake in that hobby in most major cities.

00:14:20.960 | So if you're listening and you don't love running, I'm sure there's another group that

00:14:24.880 | you can find of people that might become people to hang out with.

00:14:28.400 | Yeah, definitely.

00:14:29.040 | It doesn't have to be exercise.

00:14:31.360 | It doesn't have to be running.

00:14:32.560 | Past version of me as a fixer used to take different producers, journalists to different

00:14:38.480 | countries to show them a few cool things.

00:14:40.480 | Maybe they wanted to use it as a filming location, or they wanted to scout a photo shoot.

00:14:45.600 | I took an editor from Vanity Fair once to Iceland.

00:14:49.040 | And I did just that, except it wasn't running.

00:14:52.000 | It was knitting.

00:14:53.600 | And we found a knitting bee.

00:14:56.160 | And we just hung out with these women knitting for a whole afternoon.

00:15:01.600 | We baked... Ended up baking cakes with them.

00:15:04.000 | Find that point in common and start from there.

00:15:07.920 | I like that.

00:15:10.080 | Talk a little bit more about being a fixer in Iceland.

00:15:12.800 | What is that experience like?

00:15:14.400 | And how would someone who doesn't know anything about a country find the person like you in

00:15:20.880 | that country to hire to help show them the ins and outs?

00:15:24.240 | I'm guessing you didn't just have a website where you're like, "I'm the Iceland fixer guy.

00:15:27.760 | Come hire me."

00:15:28.560 | I know all that happened word of mouth.

00:15:31.440 | But I worked at Lonely Planet for about 7 full years doing back-to-back guidebooks for them.

00:15:39.600 | And the thing about Lonely Planet is essentially you just get paid to

00:15:43.200 | marinate in a destination for a very extended amount of time.

00:15:47.520 | And every day, you're going out looking for something new and cool.

00:15:51.280 | And through that, I built a portfolio of destinations where I could consider myself a

00:15:58.400 | real expert.

00:15:59.440 | It wasn't just because I had done one trip there for a month.

00:16:02.960 | It was because I was clocking years in these places and spending all of my time getting

00:16:08.160 | to know all the right people, getting to eat in the right places.

00:16:11.120 | And through that, I nurtured relationships where people were like, "You're the Iceland.

00:16:16.160 | We're looking at doing a movie there.

00:16:17.760 | We want to shoot a TV show there.

00:16:19.120 | We're looking for a few people, this, that, and the other."

00:16:21.360 | And I was like, "Let's go.

00:16:22.240 | Let's fly over.

00:16:23.120 | I'll rent a car.

00:16:23.840 | I'll drive you to all the places you need."

00:16:25.360 | And that's how it happened.

00:16:27.440 | I'm just thinking of a practical way to apply this.

00:16:31.040 | Go back, look at the people that wrote Lonely Planet books.

00:16:33.760 | Look at all the authors.

00:16:34.960 | Do you think if you got a random email from someone, maybe even someone listening to this

00:16:38.320 | and said, "Hey, I'm planning a trip to Iceland.

00:16:41.200 | Would you help answer some questions?

00:16:42.960 | Or even could I hire you for a couple hours to help me think about what I should do?"

00:16:46.720 | Is that a hack to go find journalists or authors of guidebooks and

00:16:50.800 | reach out to them and see if you can hire them for their expertise?

00:16:54.240 | Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

00:16:56.000 | However, the first question that you need to ask someone if you're going to find them

00:17:00.400 | in the back of a guidebook was "How long ago was it that you spent an extended period of

00:17:06.480 | time there?"

00:17:07.440 | Because travel content expires.

00:17:10.000 | It's like dairy.

00:17:11.040 | You have to keep updating.

00:17:13.200 | It's this relentless perishing of data, which I find so gratifying in a way because every

00:17:21.680 | time you go back to the country, it's totally new.

00:17:24.480 | You can't rest on your laurels.

00:17:26.400 | Restaurants are always changing.

00:17:27.920 | Infrastructure is changing.

00:17:28.960 | The economy is changing.

00:17:30.240 | There's a virus.

00:17:31.280 | There's a war.

00:17:32.480 | Things are always happening.

00:17:34.080 | So, absolutely, you could totally flip to the back of a guidebook.

00:17:39.680 | And if you find their email address, you're going to reach out.

00:17:42.240 | Question number one, "When were you there?"

00:17:44.800 | Alright.

00:17:45.920 | You spent a lot of time writing guidebooks at Lonely Planet.

00:17:48.560 | I don't know the exact number, but it was over 50.

00:17:50.560 | What about that process do you think people should know about how you write the guidebooks,

00:17:57.760 | about how you do the research that might give them a different perspective on how to use them?

00:18:03.360 | So, I can only speak to my experience at Lonely Planet, but guidebooks are not cursory.

00:18:09.120 | They are deep dives into a destination with real destination experts.

00:18:17.280 | And the things that are not in the guidebook are the things that were not worth putting

00:18:22.160 | in a guidebook.

00:18:22.960 | I'm not going to fill a guidebook with the restaurants you shouldn't go to.

00:18:27.360 | It's a waste of paper.

00:18:29.600 | I am giving you all the tools to build the perfect trip that you see fit.

00:18:34.640 | That's perfect for you.

00:18:36.480 | It's like a choose-your-own-adventure.

00:18:37.920 | Remember those books?

00:18:38.880 | Yeah, I loved it.

00:18:40.240 | It's like that.

00:18:41.120 | Yeah, it's okay.

00:18:42.160 | Let's start at the beginning.

00:18:43.280 | We're going to go here.

00:18:44.000 | I'm going to tell you a little about this.

00:18:45.520 | Oh, does this pique your interest?

00:18:46.800 | Okay, jump over to this chapter.

00:18:48.480 | And now, we're going to talk about this part of the country.

00:18:50.480 | So, I would be sent sort of army style to touchdown.

00:18:57.040 | And I'll use Iceland as an example.

00:18:59.280 | Six months, I'm on the ground.

00:19:00.640 | There's two of us writing the book.

00:19:02.400 | We cut the country in half.

00:19:03.920 | I am going to every farm, every place that has a bed, every restaurant, every fjord that

00:19:11.600 | you can hike on.

00:19:12.880 | And it is just a constant aggregation of data.

00:19:16.640 | And then at the end, you're looking through it and you're like, "Okay, this chapter needs

00:19:20.800 | to be about 10,000 words.

00:19:22.000 | So, I think I have room for X number of restaurants."

00:19:24.640 | Okay, these were the ones that were the best across all budgets and across all

00:19:29.040 | tastes.

00:19:29.760 | And you're doing these holistic data entry over and over and over and over until you

00:19:34.080 | have refined what you think is the most perfect, well-rounded document for every traveler to

00:19:40.720 | dip into.

00:19:41.280 | Wow.

00:19:43.040 | Having done that experience a handful of times, how do you use guidebook or online reviews

00:19:50.960 | differently now?

00:19:53.600 | So, the world of guidebooking has changed so much because of social media.

00:19:59.200 | A lot of my research in 2007 was high impact.

00:20:06.000 | I was charting new trails in Borneo to visit longhouse clans that had never seen outsiders

00:20:16.800 | before.

00:20:17.440 | And then social media happened and then suddenly everyone had agency over showing the destinations

00:20:24.240 | in which they lived or the places that they were going.

00:20:27.200 | And it became this modified word of mouth where you could see everything that your friend

00:20:32.240 | was doing while they were in a destination.

00:20:34.320 | You could almost take notes.

00:20:35.600 | And so, I think the value of the guidebook has gone down over the years as more and more

00:20:41.120 | people travel, as the expenses around travel have been reduced and Airbnb grew.

00:20:47.120 | So that we could find easier places to stay on our own.

00:20:50.800 | There is this connectivity that has made guidebooks not obsolete, just one of many options when

00:20:59.200 | at one point they were crucial.

00:21:03.120 | I think that something like Yelp or something like TripAdvisor are good aggregators of data.

00:21:16.000 | They're good for making lists.

00:21:18.720 | If you decide that an Airbnb is not for you in Koh Samui, Thailand, you can go on TripAdvisor

00:21:27.360 | and make a complete list of every boutique hotel, every luxury hotel, every whatever

00:21:34.000 | place to stay and go from there.

00:21:36.560 | Do I hold value in the stars?

00:21:39.520 | No, because as someone who has actually been to every single hotel in Koh Samui, Thailand

00:21:44.560 | for Lonely Planet, I can tell you that the stars don't make sense because you travel

00:21:49.520 | there, you spend five days in one hotel and are you ranking it or how are you rating it

00:21:56.720 | against the hotel next door?

00:21:59.200 | You're not.

00:21:59.760 | So, I don't trust it as far as deciphering which hotel is better or worse.

00:22:06.960 | In fact, I would be concerned if a hotel only had five stars.

00:22:12.080 | It's not making an impact.

00:22:14.320 | I want one person to hate a hotel in those reviews because the walls were green or it

00:22:19.120 | didn't have air conditioning because it was open to the elements.

00:22:22.880 | I want a hotel to be bold.

00:22:24.320 | I want it to be memorable.

00:22:25.680 | I don't want it to be like my house.

00:22:27.280 | I think everyone's probably stayed at a Marriott.

00:22:31.680 | And when you go stay at just a standard Marriott...

00:22:33.680 | Look, Marriott as a brand has lots of different hotels.

00:22:36.640 | But just like the standard Marriott, it's hard to not know exactly what you're getting.

00:22:40.640 | So, I could imagine someone being like, "Well, this is 10 stars because I thought it was

00:22:43.680 | exactly what I wanted.

00:22:44.640 | And it met the needs, but it certainly wasn't pushing the boundaries on anything by any

00:22:49.760 | stretch."

00:22:50.400 | How do you know if you're kind of planning in advance and trying to pick between five

00:22:55.120 | hotels?

00:22:55.840 | We've agreed that the stars don't make sense.

00:22:58.480 | But you had all the data but couldn't go to the country.

00:23:01.440 | How would you try to figure out where to stay?

00:23:03.680 | How would you try to sort through the information that exists to you knowing that it's imperfect?

00:23:09.600 | Well, I always say in learning about other places, you learn a lot about yourself.

00:23:14.000 | And I think part of that is honing your instinct.

00:23:17.520 | A lot of travel requires street smarts.

00:23:22.000 | It requires a lot of big decisions in real time.

00:23:26.800 | Where am I going to stay tonight?

00:23:28.000 | Am I getting on this train to go to Bucharest?

00:23:30.560 | What am I doing?

00:23:31.600 | And I think that trusting your gut when you're reading about places or when you're looking

00:23:40.560 | at photos is really important.

00:23:43.200 | And I know that's a bit of a cop-out answer, but you're going to get a vibe when you start

00:23:46.880 | looking at photos online, when you're reading different things about different properties

00:23:50.400 | online.

00:23:50.880 | I would try to find those honest photos.

00:23:55.200 | I would use the TripAdvisor to click the user photos because they're not polished.

00:23:59.920 | You can get a real sense of the room.

00:24:01.600 | I would not be allergic to calling a hotel or emailing with a hotel.

00:24:08.480 | I think a lot of people think that your hotel experience starts the minute you check in.

00:24:16.480 | That is not true.

00:24:17.520 | If you are booking a hotel, your hotel experience starts the minute you booked it.

00:24:22.240 | All of these hotels have concierge services at a certain price point, or at least they

00:24:29.280 | have a friendly person to check in.

00:24:31.280 | And if you don't want that experience, you can book a home or an apartment rental.

00:24:37.920 | If you're booking a human to have with your hotel experience, use them.

00:24:43.120 | People never use the concierges at hotels, or people think that they can only use it

00:24:48.400 | on Saturday afternoon when they're in their hotel because they're looking for a place

00:24:52.400 | to eat Saturday or Friday night or six hours before they think they need it.

00:24:57.840 | Email your hotel.

00:24:59.040 | Email the concierge at the hotel that you're going to stay at a month before you're going

00:25:03.280 | to stay there and say, "I'm really interested in finding a run club, a knitting club.

00:25:10.400 | I'm really interested in knowing more about your rooms.

00:25:13.600 | I'm a light sleeper.

00:25:15.280 | And I'm a little worried about city noise.

00:25:17.440 | What are some of the room numbers you recommend so that I won't be woken up in the middle

00:25:21.440 | of the night?"

00:25:22.000 | It is their job to provide you that service before you've even arrived.

00:25:26.320 | It's definitely something I think most people don't think about.

00:25:29.520 | The best hotels I've stayed at have emailed me in advance and said, "Hey, we have a

00:25:33.520 | person here.

00:25:34.080 | If you have questions, ask."

00:25:35.440 | I'll share a couple of the ones I like.

00:25:37.680 | So I don't necessarily have any faith that TripAdvisor stars are good, but I think the

00:25:42.480 | review content is.

00:25:44.000 | So I'll often go and be like, "Oh, a lot of countries, some hotels have sunscreen,

00:25:49.120 | just free at the pool and some don't."

00:25:50.880 | You could go to TripAdvisor and search "sunscreen" in the reviews.

00:25:53.840 | One thing I sometimes do is you could just go to Instagram and search for a hotel and

00:25:57.680 | just look at what people are posting in the hotel.

00:26:00.640 | People post some weird stuff.

00:26:02.400 | I've definitely seen the weird people that like to post photos almost naked in their

00:26:06.400 | bathroom.

00:26:06.960 | But there's also people that post the vibe of the hotel on a Friday night in the lobby,

00:26:12.640 | which is probably not something you might see in a TripAdvisor photo.

00:26:16.880 | So that's another one.

00:26:18.720 | I've probably done this once.

00:26:20.000 | I can't remember where, but there's a place I was going and I just didn't know how to

00:26:23.280 | answer the question.

00:26:24.480 | And I think it was maybe about "Is the Wi-Fi reliable?

00:26:27.040 | Is it fast enough to do some work meetings or something?"

00:26:29.520 | And I just found people that were there that looked like they would be able to answer the

00:26:34.000 | question.

00:26:34.480 | And I just DM'ed them on Instagram and asked them a question.

00:26:36.960 | I was like, "You're here right now.

00:26:38.480 | Is the Wi-Fi reliable?"

00:26:39.520 | And they're like, "Yeah, it's super fast."

00:26:40.720 | I was like, "Cool."

00:26:41.360 | So I think social media gives us that channel as well.

00:26:43.760 | Any other hacks you have for getting knowledge about a trip?

00:26:49.920 | Yeah, so one of the big things for me is I'll go on Google Maps or I'll go on Google Earth.

00:26:55.280 | And I think a lot of people, their eye goes to the stars and the reviews on Google Maps

00:27:00.560 | about a hotel.

00:27:01.520 | What I'm looking at is I'm going to zoom out and I want to see the businesses that are

00:27:05.200 | next door.

00:27:05.920 | So I want to know if it's a city hotel, I want to know what's in the neighborhood.

00:27:10.160 | If it's a resort on a beach, this is when it's super important.

00:27:13.520 | How close is that resort to the airport?

00:27:15.760 | For good and bad reasons.

00:27:16.960 | You're going to have to take a transfer.

00:27:18.480 | But also, do you want your relaxing beach resort to have a plane going over your head

00:27:22.880 | every five minutes?

00:27:24.000 | I want to see if there's a pet hospital next to your resort and you're going to be listening

00:27:29.680 | to barking dogs all night or things like that.

00:27:33.920 | When I used to teach travel writing, Lonely Planet opened a deli office.

00:27:39.440 | I think this was back in 2012.

00:27:41.840 | And they reverse outsourced me to deli to teach upcoming Indian writers how to do a

00:27:48.160 | Lonely Planet guidebook, but for the Indian market.

00:27:51.120 | And I had days of training with them where I'd put up a slide of a hotel room and I'd

00:27:57.200 | have everyone write a review.

00:27:58.720 | And of course, this was a trap because they would just say, "Oh, the sheets are red and

00:28:03.840 | the wallpaper is nice.

00:28:05.120 | And this looks like this."

00:28:06.080 | I'm like, "Okay, first mistake, five senses.

00:28:09.440 | Your review needs to have all five senses.

00:28:11.520 | What are you hearing?

00:28:12.400 | What are you tasting?

00:28:13.200 | What does it look like?

00:28:13.920 | What are the smells?"

00:28:14.960 | And I think you need to apply that to your hotel choosing too.

00:28:21.040 | So one of the ways to see is what's around the hotel, you're going to get a sense of

00:28:24.800 | noise.

00:28:25.280 | People are really precious about noise.

00:28:28.080 | This could be a huge deal breaker at a hotel.

00:28:30.480 | So I want you to think critically about that also.

00:28:34.000 | I like that.

00:28:35.280 | The holidays and the end of the year are always a good time for two things.

00:28:40.560 | Helping those less fortunate than us and finding ways to lower our tax liability.

00:28:45.440 | Nothing brings those two things together better than being charitable, which, by the way,

00:28:49.440 | actually has a huge impact on your happiness and is why I'm so excited to be partnering

00:28:53.840 | with Daffy for this episode.

00:28:55.520 | Daffy is a not-for-profit community built around a new modern way to give, and they

00:29:00.400 | are on a mission to help people be more generous more often.

00:29:03.520 | We do all our giving through Daffy because they make it so easy to put money aside for

00:29:08.400 | charity.

00:29:09.200 | You can make a one-time contribution, or you can set a little aside each week or month,

00:29:13.760 | and all your contributions are tax-deductible.

00:29:16.960 | Except you don't actually have to know exactly where you want to give the money right away.

00:29:21.680 | In fact, you can make your tax-deductible contribution now and invest that money so

00:29:26.400 | it can grow tax-free and let you have more impact in the future.

00:29:30.000 | Then, whenever you're ready, you can give to any of more than one and a half million

00:29:35.360 | charities, schools, or faith-based organizations in a matter of seconds.

00:29:39.280 | So head on over to allthehacks.com/daffy if you want to start giving today, and for a

00:29:45.920 | limited time, if you visit that link, you can get a free $25 to give to the charity

00:29:51.280 | of your choice.

00:29:51.920 | Again, that's allthehacks.com/daffy.

00:29:54.080 | Science has shown that being charitable can actually have a huge impact on your happiness,

00:30:04.640 | which is why I'm excited to be partnering with Daffy today.

00:30:07.440 | They're a not-for-profit community built around a new modern way to give, and they

00:30:11.920 | have a mission I think we can all get behind, helping people be more generous more often.

00:30:17.680 | Amy and I use Daffy for all of our giving because they offer an account that makes it

00:30:22.000 | easy to put money aside for charity.

00:30:24.400 | You can make a one-time contribution, or you can set a little aside each week or month,

00:30:28.960 | and all your contributions are tax-deductible.

00:30:32.160 | Except you don't actually have to know exactly where you want to give the money right away.

00:30:36.880 | In fact, you can make your tax-deductible contribution now and invest that money into

00:30:41.680 | stocks or even crypto so it can grow tax-free and let you have more impact in the future.

00:30:47.280 | Then, whenever you're ready, you can give to any of more than one and a half million

00:30:52.640 | charities, schools, or faith-based organizations in a matter of seconds.

00:30:57.200 | So head on over to allthehacks.com/daffy if you want to start giving today.

00:31:02.640 | And for a limited time, if you visit that link, you can get a free $25 to give to the

00:31:08.160 | charity of your choice.

00:31:09.200 | Again, that's allthehacks.com/daffy.

00:31:11.360 | What have you learned about how do you determine what is nice if we've agreed stars and ratings

00:31:21.520 | and all those things don't matter?

00:31:23.360 | Yeah, so I have stayed at about 3,000 hotels, which is a bit crazy to think about.

00:31:32.400 | Almost 10 years.

00:31:33.920 | If just one night each, it's almost 10 years.

00:31:36.480 | For Lonely Planet, I was staying in a different hotel every night.

00:31:40.080 | And we used to get a lot of questions at Lonely Planet.

00:31:42.880 | How can you tell if a hotel is good if you're only there for a night or this, that, and

00:31:46.880 | the other?

00:31:47.280 | And I would joke that it only takes 18 minutes to suss out a hotel.

00:31:51.840 | And the things that you're looking for are design and service.

00:31:56.880 | And they have to come together.

00:31:58.880 | So, you can build a beautiful hotel that has great design, but if you can't staff it with

00:32:05.040 | individuals, it's going to be a bad stay.

00:32:07.520 | And vice versa.

00:32:09.280 | You can have a hotel that's completely falling apart, that's uncomfortable to stay in, and

00:32:14.160 | you can have friendly people, and it's still going to be a miss.

00:32:17.120 | It's like storytelling.

00:32:18.080 | You need a good story, and you need to tell it well.

00:32:20.240 | Otherwise, it's not working for you.

00:32:22.240 | So, the first thing is you want to check those two boxes.

00:32:27.200 | And design doesn't necessarily mean that it looks good on Instagram.

00:32:31.840 | A lot of hotel rooms are designed without ever someone staying in them.

00:32:38.160 | The cord to plug in your phone, it's too far, the plug from the bed, so you can't look at

00:32:44.960 | your phone in bed.

00:32:46.000 | You can't find the lights.

00:32:47.600 | There are too many lights.

00:32:48.800 | The room should be intuitive.

00:32:50.560 | I'm looking at design in that regard first.

00:32:52.880 | Second, I want my hotel room to make an impact.

00:32:57.760 | It doesn't need to be hot pink, but I want to feel like I'm on holiday.

00:33:01.840 | I would like it to embody the destination a little bit.

00:33:05.200 | It doesn't need to be a Disney-fied version of Italy.

00:33:08.560 | It doesn't need to look like a cheesecake factory.

00:33:10.480 | Like, I want to feel like I'm somewhere different.

00:33:16.080 | And then I think I want service to be genuine.

00:33:18.720 | I don't want over-polite service.

00:33:21.280 | I don't want over-attentive service.

00:33:23.120 | I think that there's a balance to when you want someone for help, that they're there

00:33:29.760 | to help you and that they know the destination.

00:33:32.640 | I want the hotels to be staffed by people who are knowledgeable.

00:33:35.440 | That can enhance my experience.

00:33:37.280 | Otherwise, I'm just going to go stay in an Airbnb.

00:33:39.440 | I think smaller, I'm looking for cleanliness.

00:33:43.280 | Rooms generally get tired after seven years.

00:33:45.920 | You have to replace a mattress.

00:33:47.520 | Mattresses are 10 years old and they expire.

00:33:50.400 | I want that mattress replaced after seven.

00:33:52.880 | I want to be taken care of.

00:33:54.960 | I want the amenities in the room to be thought through.

00:33:58.880 | And I don't want people to skimp on a crappy Q-tip.

00:34:03.360 | I want a good Q-tip.

00:34:04.480 | It's things like that.

00:34:06.160 | Is that a metric?

00:34:07.680 | Instead of five stars, you should have your own sliding scale of Q-tip quality metric.

00:34:12.800 | Yeah, for me, it's Q-tips and club sandwiches because every hotel around the world has both.

00:34:18.800 | I want to know if that club sandwich is how well it's going to be served,

00:34:22.400 | how well it's cooked.

00:34:23.760 | I want to know how far the kitchen is based on how warm or cold it is, how fast it comes.

00:34:29.600 | And a Q-tip is the best thing in a room because everyone knows that they like a nice sturdy Q-tip.

00:34:36.640 | And if it's flimsy and there's not that much cotton on it,

00:34:39.680 | they don't really care about you at this hotel and that money is the bottom line.

00:34:43.440 | Wow, I like that.

00:34:44.480 | Who has the best Q-tips and club sandwiches?

00:34:46.880 | Man, that's a really good question.

00:34:48.560 | I have found, and this is maybe a little bit of French snobbery in me,

00:34:53.600 | but countries around the world that have been touched by French influence

00:34:57.680 | always have it figured out much better.

00:35:01.360 | I've eaten an incredible club sandwich in Madagascar, for example.

00:35:06.320 | And where?

00:35:08.000 | So in Tena, in the capital, I stayed at this guest house that had amazing food,

00:35:14.160 | truly amazing food.

00:35:15.760 | And it's just the care and that sort of French style of hospitality

00:35:19.680 | where every detail is important.

00:35:21.680 | You have that joie de vivre.

00:35:22.960 | It really made it a very memorable stay.

00:35:24.800 | And it was only supposed to be kind of like a layover stay.

00:35:28.160 | I was in the middle of Madagascar on a trip

00:35:30.320 | and then had to connect through the capital to do another portion.

00:35:33.520 | And I didn't think I was going to get much out of it.

00:35:35.760 | And then it just turned out to be this wonderful place.

00:35:38.800 | You have to send us the name of this place and we'll put it in the show notes.

00:35:42.480 | Any other places known for their club?

00:35:44.560 | I've had some of the best Western food in Japan.

00:35:48.800 | And that is because there's this deep-seated element to Japanese culture

00:35:56.400 | where they scout the world for interesting things

00:36:01.680 | and then they reappropriate it and improve it.

00:36:05.680 | And ramen is the best example of that.

00:36:07.520 | Chinese by origin.

00:36:09.040 | They brought it over to Japan after World War II.

00:36:13.760 | It got really popular.

00:36:15.680 | The broth, four days of pork broth steeping.

00:36:20.480 | And they made it into something that was really their own.

00:36:23.920 | And I think I see them doing it a lot with baked goods,

00:36:26.480 | French breads, different things like that.

00:36:29.680 | You will have the best pastries of your life in Tokyo.

00:36:34.320 | There are countries that everyone talks about and are overrated.

00:36:38.480 | And then there's countries that everyone talks about

00:36:40.480 | and you should still definitely go and just keep going.

00:36:42.960 | And I think Japan is like the essence of a country

00:36:46.960 | that everyone talks about and you should still keep going.

00:36:49.520 | I 100% agree.

00:36:51.920 | I think there are places around the world of incredibly wondrous places

00:36:57.920 | that everyone already knows about.

00:36:59.600 | You should still go.

00:37:00.480 | You don't have to be a contrarian.

00:37:02.160 | Machu Picchu.

00:37:03.440 | It's incredible when the clouds lift off of it in the morning.

00:37:08.080 | It is amazing.

00:37:09.840 | I want you to go do it.

00:37:11.280 | Just because a lot of other people have doesn't mean you should skip it.

00:37:14.720 | What else is on that list of places that even though everyone seems to go there,

00:37:19.680 | you think are still standout destinations?

00:37:22.880 | Japan is always at the top of my list.

00:37:27.200 | When people ask me what are my favorite places,

00:37:29.680 | I just would encourage people not to treat it totally as this otherworldly thing

00:37:37.200 | because then you don't have the opportunity to connect

00:37:40.320 | and have that meaningful experience.

00:37:42.880 | I don't treat it like an alien world.

00:37:45.360 | There are a lot of things that are similar but improved

00:37:49.040 | like the club sandwich I was mentioning before.

00:37:52.160 | The attention to detail and care is a different form of hospitality,

00:37:58.400 | the way that things are presented, the aesthetics.

00:38:01.040 | I once did a story for Bloomberg where I went to Kyoto

00:38:04.880 | and I wrote a whole story about what if you did only new things in Kyoto

00:38:09.120 | because everyone's hardwired to think Tokyo new, Kyoto old.

00:38:14.240 | But what if we flip the script and we did Tokyo old, Kyoto new.

00:38:19.440 | And I found these incredible photographers, performance artists,

00:38:26.000 | people that were changing the way sushi is made.

00:38:30.640 | And it was maybe one of my best four days in Japan ever by doing Kyoto new.

00:38:36.240 | Wow. And then Tokyo old as well?

00:38:39.200 | Tokyo old, you can go to the northeast part of the city.

00:38:45.520 | It was the only area that wasn't really bombed during World War II

00:38:50.240 | and it didn't suffer as much during the Great Kanto Earthquake in the 1920s.

00:38:54.560 | And all of that is really well preserved.

00:38:57.520 | Rent a bicycle, go through Yanaka, that neighborhood.

00:39:01.680 | I wrote The Lonely Planet Guide to Japan and I created a pilgrimage

00:39:07.040 | that people do on New Year's but I created it so you could do it anytime.

00:39:11.600 | And you're looking for seven shrines of seven different deities.

00:39:16.560 | And it's good luck to do it on New Year's to go to all seven.

00:39:19.040 | But I laid them out in one of the older neighborhoods.

00:39:22.000 | You could do it anytime.

00:39:23.520 | And the point was just getting you through some of these back alleys

00:39:26.400 | so that you could see some old ceramics shops.

00:39:30.480 | And I didn't want to name the shop because I wanted you to find it on your own.

00:39:34.320 | I like that.

00:39:35.920 | And do you feel like for someone going on this experience,

00:39:38.400 | just walking into the shop, you don't need to know which one,

00:39:41.680 | you don't need to have a reservation, you can just explore in a place like that?

00:39:44.880 | Yeah, I think sometimes when there's a really cool neighborhood

00:39:49.360 | that you want people to check out, it actually doesn't damage to pick

00:39:53.280 | the one ramen place in the neighborhood that has 10 great ramen places.

00:39:58.320 | And I've tried all of them and the differences are negligible.

00:40:01.040 | There's so much joy in the feeling of discovery

00:40:04.240 | that I'd rather just lead you to the cool neighborhood

00:40:07.760 | and then let you figure it out from there.

00:40:09.200 | And I think that's what actually a lot of people want these days.

00:40:11.680 | Right now, I'm late for lunch on the West Coast

00:40:14.720 | and a bowl of ramen is exactly what I want these days.

00:40:17.440 | I know so many people that plan a trip to Japan

00:40:19.360 | and it's I'm going to Tokyo and I'm going to Kyoto.

00:40:21.840 | Throw out a few places that someone going to those two cities should tack on.

00:40:26.640 | Sure.

00:40:28.320 | I think if Kyoto is your vibe,

00:40:30.640 | and you're a little worried that it's going to be overrun with tourists,

00:40:33.680 | I would go to Kanazawa.

00:40:35.120 | In the feudal times of Japan, Kanazawa was the second most powerful area.

00:40:39.760 | So it's giving you a lot of the Kyoto vibes that you're looking for.

00:40:42.720 | Less tourists, a little bit smaller scale.

00:40:46.160 | And right outside of Kanazawa is Kaga.

00:40:48.800 | And it's a region that has a lot of hot mineral water.

00:40:52.080 | So it's one of the most popular onsen destinations where you can go for a soak.

00:40:58.080 | This area has some of the coolest ryokan hotels,

00:41:01.520 | which are these little inns that usually have a hot spring attached.

00:41:05.760 | And it's a completely inclusive, immersive stay

00:41:09.040 | where you're always wearing your yukata robe.

00:41:11.760 | And you have this set dinner and everything's planned out for you.

00:41:15.280 | And you're just constant hospitality and everything's taken care of.

00:41:18.560 | Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are really into Hokkaido,

00:41:22.800 | you know, leaving Honshu, the main island, going to Hokkaido, going to Kyushu.

00:41:27.120 | Shikoku is often left off of people's itineraries.

00:41:30.640 | And this is the Japan that hasn't been glamorized.

00:41:34.000 | There's a lot of really cool inns, Minshuku, where you can stay.

00:41:37.840 | And you'll have that experience where you're going to cook

00:41:40.720 | with the person who runs the inn, but because they need your help,

00:41:43.920 | not because you're paying them to have that commoditized cooking experience.

00:41:49.440 | Sounds awesome.

00:41:50.880 | We are anxiously awaiting the reopening of Japan for another trip back.

00:41:55.360 | It was our last trip before the pandemic.

00:41:59.520 | So hearing you talk about writing The Lonely Planet for Japan,

00:42:02.960 | which I imagine was months of time getting to explore everything about the country,

00:42:07.600 | it makes me just think, "Wow, you have the best job in the world."

00:42:11.600 | And I'm sure many people listening here would agree.

00:42:14.640 | From that perspective, what's the downside to having a job where

00:42:18.480 | you basically get to go live in incredible places on someone else's dime,

00:42:22.400 | eat at the best restaurants, go try out all these amazing hotels?

00:42:27.040 | There has to be something that keeps everyone from wanting to do it.

00:42:30.240 | There is a really tough pace to keep.

00:42:33.840 | And I know all of us are pretty stressed by our jobs these days.

00:42:38.560 | But the pace that you have to go into a destination,

00:42:43.920 | try your best to uncover everything that you need for your story,

00:42:47.440 | and not miss anything, but also not miss your deadline is really tough to balance.

00:42:52.880 | And for me, I've had a hard time balancing that at different points in my career.

00:42:56.720 | What's funny about travel is that you have to pack every day to move to a different place.

00:43:05.680 | And so you have to be super mindful about the big and the small.

00:43:10.320 | Travel writing is one of those skill sets that you need to know big picture,

00:43:15.040 | you need to know your destination, the context,

00:43:17.520 | how it sits against other destinations and paint a world in your story.

00:43:23.440 | And then you need to know that the bus leaves at 2.45 so that you don't miss it.

00:43:28.560 | And that you need to get all the things from your room so you don't leave a bunch of stuff in your

00:43:33.120 | room. It only exists in the two extremes and nothing in the middle.

00:43:38.400 | And I think 99% of careers are in the middle.

00:43:40.800 | So you have to really hone your ability to think super macro and super micro.

00:43:48.080 | So you mentioned that you're always packing every day when you're writing these

00:43:51.600 | books and trying out these new hotels every day.

00:43:54.000 | I want to talk a little about packing and the hacks around what you bring on a trip.

00:43:58.640 | Because 3,000 hotels, you've packed your bags more than I think anyone

00:44:03.520 | has ever packed their bags ever in their life.

00:44:05.600 | You've probably thought about every single item you bring on a trip,

00:44:09.760 | every type of clothing, everything more than once.

00:44:12.160 | What are things you've learned in that process?

00:44:16.320 | When I was really into this one particular bag,

00:44:19.520 | it was called the over-under bag because it was a rolling suitcase that was a bit squishy.

00:44:25.120 | And it was two different sizes depending on a zipper.

00:44:28.320 | Going on the trip, it could be a carry-on.

00:44:30.160 | And then if you bought things while you were there,

00:44:32.080 | it could expand to a bag that went under the plane.

00:44:34.800 | I was really obsessed with this bag for a long time.

00:44:37.600 | Also, you want to have a soft bag if part of your trip is going to be on a small airplane.

00:44:43.920 | So it's great to have the Rimavan and

00:44:46.320 | those kinds of bags that have a hard shell to protect everything within.

00:44:49.520 | But you can't bring them on safari planes or puddle jumpers in the Caribbean.

00:44:53.760 | So I would always travel, especially for Lonely Planet, with this

00:44:57.440 | squishy over-under because I didn't know what I was going to get myself into.

00:45:00.560 | But I always was prepared.

00:45:02.000 | So that was my first thing.

00:45:03.840 | And do you still carry it?

00:45:05.680 | Yeah, I still have it.

00:45:07.280 | What else are you bringing?

00:45:08.880 | Shoes, cameras?

00:45:11.360 | What kinds of things do you bring to make a trip perfect for you?

00:45:15.440 | If there's one thing that you want to whittle down,

00:45:19.120 | it's shoes because they take up so much room.

00:45:22.960 | They are filthy.

00:45:24.640 | So if you can have a versatile shoe that can read,

00:45:28.240 | you can go to a nice restaurant in a certain shoe,

00:45:30.400 | but you can also do a really long walk.

00:45:33.040 | I would invest in that and invest in a very comfortable version of that.

00:45:36.960 | That's the first thing.

00:45:38.400 | You don't want to fill your bag with five different pairs of shoes.

00:45:41.120 | Is there a shoe or two you've found that do that?

00:45:43.600 | I like Palladiums a lot.

00:45:45.760 | They're really durable.

00:45:47.040 | And I think they were made for the French army using leftover tires.

00:45:55.280 | And now they're like a super durable shoe.

00:45:57.040 | You can go on a hike.

00:45:58.640 | And they're cool enough looking that you can definitely wear them to a bar.

00:46:03.760 | Awesome.

00:46:04.560 | What about taking photos?

00:46:06.240 | Talk about how you balance capturing a trip with really experiencing a destination.

00:46:11.680 | Yeah, photography is tricky.

00:46:13.600 | I think that a lot of people live their lives on social media.

00:46:19.280 | And when you're in a place,

00:46:20.640 | you'll find that people are looking at the destination through their phone.

00:46:24.720 | For some people that works, that's not really my bag.

00:46:27.840 | I tend to be very present in what I'm doing.

00:46:30.640 | And I forget sometimes to post on social media.

00:46:32.800 | I'm not like huge on social media,

00:46:34.880 | but I do enjoy making people jealous every once in a while with a fun photo.

00:46:38.960 | I'll take a lot of photos to jog my memory

00:46:41.280 | for when I'm writing up an article after I get home.

00:46:44.400 | And there have been these moments that I wanted to capture

00:46:49.200 | when I see something truly unique.

00:46:50.720 | And it's usually not the sunset at the Eiffel Tower

00:46:55.840 | of which there's already 50 better versions.

00:46:59.600 | But I like capturing those moments of serendipity.

00:47:02.640 | The best example I can think of was on a trip to Kyrgyzstan a few years ago.

00:47:07.760 | I was with a group of semi-nomadic people

00:47:11.600 | and they had a really busted up old car that they were driving around in.

00:47:20.560 | And they were eagle hunters.

00:47:21.840 | And we got out of the car, parked,

00:47:25.440 | and the father put his eagle on his arm before he let it go hunt.

00:47:32.000 | And it's this photo of this.

00:47:34.000 | He's wearing these 2,000-year-old seeming skins.

00:47:38.000 | The eagle is on his arm cawing.

00:47:42.160 | And there's this beaten up car from 1972 right beside him.

00:47:47.120 | It's this bizarre moment of juxtaposition.

00:47:49.600 | And I just had to have it.

00:47:51.360 | It couldn't just be a memory for me.

00:47:54.400 | It had to be a photo.

00:47:56.240 | It's not a quantity thing for you.

00:47:59.120 | It's trying to find the moments that are really different

00:48:02.000 | and something that you'd want to look back on and remember.

00:48:05.600 | Yeah, I don't want a photo that someone's already taken a better version.

00:48:09.440 | I want to capture my moments of serendipity.

00:48:13.360 | That's what I use photography for.

00:48:14.960 | Cool.

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00:49:30.560 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

00:49:36.160 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

00:49:38.960 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners,

00:49:43.440 | you can go to allthehacks.com/deals.

00:49:47.040 | So please consider supporting those who support us.

00:49:50.160 | You've traveled a lot. What are your favorite hacks that we haven't hit on already?

00:49:54.320 | I really like helping people plan their trips.

00:49:56.960 | And I know that we touched a little bit on some of the kind of big picture things,

00:50:01.200 | but one rule that I like to apply to a lot of trip planning is

00:50:04.720 | an hour on a plane for a day in the destination.

00:50:09.120 | And you don't have to follow it exactly, but it kind of goaltends a little bit.

00:50:13.920 | If you're going to fly across the country, across America,

00:50:17.280 | and it's going to take four or five hours, try to have four or five days

00:50:20.880 | because you're going to spend so much time in transit.

00:50:24.160 | Flying is tricky. You have to be there early.

00:50:26.880 | You're going to be on the flight. Bank some time in the destination

00:50:30.480 | or pick a closer destination if you only have two days.

00:50:33.920 | You know, if you're only doing a Friday, Saturday, Sunday,

00:50:37.360 | pick a place that's an hour's flight. Don't try to go to Paris for two days.

00:50:42.400 | You're just going to end up tired and not getting out of it what you wanted.

00:50:48.320 | So one hour in the plane for one day in the destination.

00:50:51.920 | I would design an itinerary like the way you read a fairy tale,

00:50:55.040 | where it starts off where you're setting the world.

00:50:58.320 | So you're understanding the world in a broader way.

00:51:02.160 | And then there's turmoil.

00:51:04.800 | And that means a difficult experience. Give yourself a challenge.

00:51:09.520 | Give yourself --get out of the box, try something new.

00:51:12.640 | It can be a physical challenge, a big hike, an overnight camping,

00:51:16.560 | something that maybe is a little bit unusual for you, and then have a happy ending.

00:51:21.280 | So put your best hotel at the end. Put your most expensive hotel at the end.

00:51:25.360 | You don't want everything else to feel disappointing

00:51:28.640 | because it came after the best thing you did.

00:51:31.360 | Is there a place you think people are overspending or underspending?

00:51:37.280 | Are they spending too much on food when they travel or hotels when they travel?

00:51:40.880 | And if they spent their money in a different way, they might have a better trip?

00:51:44.160 | It's interesting to look at nationalities and how they spend.

00:51:50.560 | A lot of different cultures will spend way more on hotels and then way less on food,

00:51:56.080 | like Americans, for example.

00:51:58.000 | But then you see Israelis, for example, actually spend way more on food than they do on hotels.

00:52:06.960 | So there's a lot of cultural differences that dictate

00:52:09.840 | how we're spending our money in our different destinations.

00:52:12.880 | Americans really like to have the comfort.

00:52:14.480 | They like to have their nice big bathroom and a clean toilet and a nice bed.

00:52:19.200 | That's super important to them.

00:52:20.880 | And so I can't really judge how people are going to spend their money when they're away.

00:52:25.520 | But what I can say is that there are a lot of big value destinations,

00:52:31.040 | places where your dollar is going to go way further than the place you thought you wanted to go.

00:52:36.000 | I love Iceland and I'll tell you everything you want to know.

00:52:38.640 | I've written books about Iceland.

00:52:40.480 | But if you're looking for those chiseled fjords and tundra and wildlife for big night skies,

00:52:50.240 | and you think that it's going to be Iceland, I would challenge you to think of somewhere

00:52:55.200 | that might seem less sexy like Newfoundland in Canada.

00:52:59.920 | It looks like it broke off from Iceland.

00:53:02.640 | And I think it really did.

00:53:04.640 | There's all the fjords.

00:53:06.400 | You're going to get the whales puffing in the bay.

00:53:08.880 | You're going to get icebergs floating by.

00:53:11.280 | Incredible accommodation, incredible food, the fish.

00:53:15.680 | Oh my god.

00:53:16.320 | The biggest fishing banks in the world are off the coast of Newfoundland.

00:53:19.680 | And you're going to spend kroners in Iceland.

00:53:24.880 | You're going to spend Canadian dollars, which is like monopoly money for an American in Canada.

00:53:31.120 | Wow.

00:53:31.600 | Are there other places like that where you'd say,

00:53:34.880 | "If this is what you were looking for, here's an awesome thing you haven't considered"?

00:53:38.480 | Yeah.

00:53:39.440 | If you're thinking about mountains and Alps, and you want to go to Switzerland or France

00:53:44.240 | or Italy, and you want your Lake Como and you want to have your Heidi experience,

00:53:50.880 | go to Slovenia instead.

00:53:52.400 | It's right next door.

00:53:55.200 | It's still in the Alps.

00:53:57.040 | You're getting those snow-capped mountains.

00:53:58.960 | You're getting the lakes.

00:53:59.920 | You're getting food that is basically cheaper Italian food.

00:54:04.640 | You're going into people's homes and they're smoking salamis in their basement.

00:54:09.120 | And you're having wine that shares veins of loam and soil with some of the most famous

00:54:16.800 | Italian wines.

00:54:18.240 | But very few people think to go to Slovenia.

00:54:20.320 | I'm going to let you keep going because I now have two new places to go on my list.

00:54:24.880 | So what else do we hit up?

00:54:26.960 | I think that people want to go to Australia because they want to see the other end of

00:54:31.920 | the world.

00:54:32.400 | I love Australia.

00:54:33.520 | I think the color of the sky in Australia is different than it is in America.

00:54:38.320 | That's the first thing that you'll notice.

00:54:40.000 | And it's this place of incredible desolation when you get out of the cities.

00:54:44.320 | And a lot of people think that they want to go up the East Coast, Queensland.

00:54:48.720 | They want to go to Cairns.

00:54:49.680 | They want to see the Great Barrier Reef.

00:54:51.280 | But go to Western Australia.

00:54:54.560 | That's where it's at.

00:54:55.520 | Because if you want that orange desert, the Uluru sand, and you want the Turquoise Bay,

00:55:02.720 | they actually collide in Western Australia.

00:55:06.080 | So if you're on the Ningaloo Reef or you're in Exmouth, Shark Bay, all that bright orange

00:55:12.720 | sand from Uluru hits the coastline at the clearest water you will ever see halfway up

00:55:20.080 | the coast between Perth and Broome.

00:55:21.600 | That's amazing.

00:55:23.200 | You write about a lot of this.

00:55:24.400 | You wrote a whole article on where to go in 2022 that I'll link here.

00:55:28.000 | Any other places to highlight from that list that someone thinking about maybe a trip in

00:55:34.400 | the fall this year should consider that they probably weren't already thinking about?

00:55:39.120 | Yeah.

00:55:39.920 | So I'll let you in on a secret.

00:55:41.280 | I actually consult on a lot of those lists for a lot of different magazines.

00:55:45.520 | So I contributed to a list for Harper's Bazaar this year.

00:55:51.440 | And I also contributed to the list for Bloomberg.

00:55:54.800 | And they're very different readers.

00:55:56.080 | Bloomberg tends to skew male, active.

00:55:59.120 | Harper's Bazaar tends to be their mistresses.

00:56:03.200 | And so I pick very different places depending on the audience.

00:56:09.760 | I try to tailor those lists to whoever's paying attention.

00:56:13.440 | Creating those lists has been hugely difficult for the last few years because of geopolitics

00:56:20.240 | and COVID.

00:56:21.200 | And I think what we're seeing in travel right now is a return to travel 101 where people

00:56:27.280 | miss the places they like to go.

00:56:29.920 | We're seeing a lot of interest in France and Italy and Greece and the UK and Ireland.

00:56:36.720 | People really want to go back to Japan.

00:56:38.800 | Whereas before the pandemic in the year leading up to the pandemic, I was in Uzbekistan, the

00:56:45.680 | Gambia.

00:56:47.120 | I was dipping into places that were on the verge of being on our mental maps.

00:56:53.360 | So I would encourage people to go back to the places that they miss first, fulfill that

00:57:01.520 | need, and then start looking at the new.

00:57:06.240 | And I know that's not a super sexy answer, but I think there's a lot of places that are

00:57:12.800 | perfectly pronounceable that we should be checking out.

00:57:15.440 | Next week, I'm going to Madeira, for example, a Portuguese-owned island off the coast of

00:57:20.800 | Africa.

00:57:22.160 | And I think that strikes the perfect balance of familiar and new because Portugal has been

00:57:28.080 | trending for a few years now.

00:57:29.920 | It's a place that everyone in the travel media world has hit.

00:57:33.360 | Madeira is a little off-kilter, right?

00:57:36.080 | It's going to give you that Portuguese sensibility, but you're going to get these volcanic crags

00:57:40.400 | and you're going to get passing whales and you're going to stay in a quinta instead of

00:57:44.480 | a hotel.

00:57:44.960 | You're going to stay in a little inn that's tended to by local individuals, and you're

00:57:49.680 | going to eat fresh seafood, and you're going to see a different version of a place that

00:57:54.880 | you know.

00:57:55.600 | I think I have whales on my radar, too, this year for another story.

00:58:00.160 | Again, a slightly off-kilter version of something you probably already know, the UK, but we're

00:58:06.160 | going to go into little villages and crumbling castles.

00:58:08.720 | And there's a huge whiskey industry that has really grown over the last 20 years.

00:58:14.640 | And now they're ready to compete with scotch.

00:58:17.200 | And I want to go see what that's about.

00:58:18.880 | Everything is like version 2.1.

00:58:21.120 | Is there an argument to be made that if the hottest places in travel right now are the

00:58:28.160 | Spain, the Italy, the France, now is the year to go counter.

00:58:33.120 | Go to Uzbekistan.

00:58:34.320 | Go to the places that no one's wanting to go to.

00:58:37.200 | Is that where maybe the best deals are to be had in the next year or two?

00:58:41.440 | Yeah.

00:58:41.760 | I think we're running into something a little tricky, which is that there is this sort of

00:58:47.520 | latent xenophobia that we're finding because countries are concerned about how other countries

00:58:52.720 | handled COVID.

00:58:54.640 | And we're seeing supply chain issues.

00:58:58.160 | We're seeing this sort of fake fuel issue.

00:59:02.720 | And everyone's girding their loins.

00:59:05.680 | And what we're going to see is that travel will be easier based on where trade already

00:59:13.040 | occurs.

00:59:13.680 | So Canada, America, Mexico is going to remain a really easy artery to travel within.

00:59:19.920 | Europe will be easy for Europeans.

00:59:22.560 | Asia is sort of multipolar.

00:59:24.000 | So you're going to see easy travel within the Middle East, easy travel within South

00:59:27.440 | Asia, East Asia.

00:59:28.960 | It's going to remain easier to travel in our regional bubbles.

00:59:34.640 | And prices will go up if you want to bust through that bubble.

00:59:38.640 | So if you can find that inexpensive plane ticket to Uzbekistan, seize the opportunity

00:59:46.480 | because unfortunately, I think that will only get worse.

00:59:50.160 | So you mentioned Uzbekistan as a great place.

00:59:53.440 | What's on your list?

00:59:54.480 | I think you've hit, what, 130 countries.

00:59:57.680 | Are there places that somehow you've just never had the opportunity to go to, but really

01:00:01.760 | want to?

01:00:02.320 | And when are you going?

01:00:03.840 | So yeah, I have been to about 130 countries.

01:00:06.400 | And I do not want to be accused as a country counter because I've been to Iceland 37 times.

01:00:15.600 | I have three trips to the Tahiti plan this year.

01:00:18.880 | I like to go back to a lot of places that I know.

01:00:21.360 | And I like to dig even deeper.

01:00:23.680 | I do try to find opportunities to visit somewhere new, but I want it to be organic.

01:00:29.200 | I don't want to go somewhere and not have a plan or a point of view or an idea for a

01:00:33.680 | story.

01:00:34.160 | I like to go everywhere with a mission.

01:00:36.400 | My mission tends to be finding information and personalities for an article.

01:00:41.760 | And so when things start to bake in those places, I prioritize that new place.

01:00:46.880 | I am really interested in countries that are about to pivot from oil to tourism.

01:00:53.280 | I think for a lot of places are just totally off the map because they've never been interested

01:01:01.840 | in garnering tourists until now.

01:01:04.480 | So a country like Angola off the coast of Southwest Africa, because they've done so

01:01:11.040 | much offshore drilling, the interior of their country is pristine.

01:01:16.240 | And we've seen so many parts of Southern Africa get turned into agriculture or forms

01:01:25.600 | of monetizing the land.

01:01:27.920 | But this is a country that is wild in the interior.

01:01:31.680 | And I want to go before it develops.

01:01:33.360 | So I tried so hard to go to Angola.

01:01:38.320 | And I don't mean that in a strange way.

01:01:40.160 | I physically tried so hard because we were in Namibia and there was a river between Namibia

01:01:46.240 | and Angola.

01:01:46.960 | And we had a hand dug canoe and a guy I'd met traveling from Sweden and I attempted

01:01:54.800 | to row to the other side to go say hi to some people that were in Angola.

01:02:01.440 | And we literally could not cross the current of the river.

01:02:04.400 | And we tried so hard.

01:02:06.400 | So Angola has a special place for me as one of the few countries that I could maybe even

01:02:12.400 | throw a rock to, but I physically was not able to get myself into.

01:02:16.560 | Now, I have no idea what the legal ramifications of crossing the border in an unauthorized

01:02:21.440 | place would have been separate, but was not possible physically.

01:02:25.120 | I have been on the Kunene River myself and touched into Angola, but I don't count it.

01:02:30.000 | I was actually trying to say hi to some people too and touched down.

01:02:33.920 | But in my mind, I was like, I can't count this as a visit.

01:02:36.720 | I need to go to Luanda and start from the beginning.

01:02:39.120 | Do you have a requirement to say you've been to a place?

01:02:42.720 | Obviously, you can't just be touching the ground.

01:02:44.320 | You need to spend a night there, a meal there.

01:02:46.480 | What's your rule?

01:02:47.440 | My personal rule is that, first of all, I need to be choosing to go there.

01:02:52.480 | So a lot of people who've had a layover in a country, they say that they've been to that

01:02:55.840 | country.

01:02:56.320 | That doesn't count for me.

01:02:57.360 | It needs to be my end destination.

01:03:00.240 | It can be part of a three-country trip or something like that.

01:03:03.280 | But I have to spend a night in that place.

01:03:05.600 | It used to be that you had to get a stamp.

01:03:08.320 | So many countries don't use stamps now.

01:03:10.000 | So you mentioned you write a lot for Bloomberg now.

01:03:13.040 | And there is a series of articles that you've written.

01:03:17.200 | And I went deep on them.

01:03:19.920 | And I imagine when I start talking about them, people listening will too.

01:03:23.680 | I don't even know how it all started.

01:03:25.760 | So I'd love to hear the story.

01:03:27.040 | But best I understand it, you spend a few days to a week doing a hospitality job at

01:03:34.000 | the intersection of really high-end luxury and report on the inner workings.

01:03:39.120 | I read about you working on a private jet at a high-end hotel, being the maitre d at

01:03:44.960 | Nobu, working on a luxury yacht.

01:03:47.440 | How did that happen?

01:03:49.600 | And how has that experience been?

01:03:52.480 | The origin story is totally random, and we did not think it was going to turn into a

01:03:59.360 | column.

01:03:59.920 | A friend of mine used to work for Norwegian.

01:04:03.920 | And they started long-haul flights between North America and Europe.

01:04:10.000 | And they were so well-priced.

01:04:11.440 | And they were all new planes.

01:04:12.960 | And even though the premium economy was pretty comfortable and inexpensive, he was pitching

01:04:19.760 | it to me for an article.

01:04:22.880 | And I was like, "Listen, I love this.

01:04:25.200 | It all sounds great.

01:04:26.080 | It's not reinventing the wheel, though."

01:04:29.200 | And he was like, "What if you worked as a flight attendant on one of our planes?"

01:04:35.120 | And I was like, "That sounds cool, but crazy.

01:04:37.440 | I mean, how?

01:04:38.160 | I'm not trained."

01:04:38.960 | And it took three months of getting all these different approvals.

01:04:42.960 | And we did it completely above board.

01:04:45.200 | And sure enough, I worked as a flight attendant on a long-haul flight from London to New York.

01:04:49.920 | And I interviewed my colleagues.

01:04:52.880 | And I reported authentically on what it was like to be on that plane.

01:04:57.440 | And the traffic on that story was absurd.

01:05:01.360 | We'd never seen numbers like that for a travel story at Bloomberg.

01:05:05.040 | And then we thought, "What if I did another job?"

01:05:08.480 | And the next job that I did was I was a butler at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

01:05:13.600 | And that story did even better.

01:05:16.480 | And from then on, in-house, we called it the butler stories.

01:05:20.640 | "Oh, what's the next butler story that you're going to do?"

01:05:23.680 | Because the vibe of it was service.

01:05:28.000 | So service heroics is essentially what it is.

01:05:31.760 | And I go all over the world to the world's most coveted brands.

01:05:36.800 | I embed myself in the product.

01:05:39.200 | I serve the wealthy elite of the world.

01:05:42.800 | And I report on what it's like to do so.

01:05:44.880 | So I was a personal shopper at Barney's.

01:05:47.200 | I was a maitre d' at Nobu.

01:05:48.880 | I was a ski instructor in Aspen.

01:05:51.440 | I worked on a superyacht in the Caribbean, a private jet in Texas.

01:05:58.240 | I just actually finished another one.

01:06:00.400 | I'm on deadline to write it all up.

01:06:02.720 | And that one will be coming out at the end of April.

01:06:08.000 | And it's been one of the coolest things in my career, to be honest.

01:06:12.960 | And I used to think that I was trading in obscure geography,

01:06:15.840 | and that I always wanted to be the first person

01:06:17.440 | that had boots on the ground and an emerging destination.

01:06:19.920 | But writing these stories has given me incredible access

01:06:25.280 | to some places that have been so private to the world before.

01:06:30.160 | Are there some examples of some of the most interesting things

01:06:35.360 | you've seen or learned?

01:06:36.880 | I will fully endorse anyone listening to go read them,

01:06:40.240 | but throw out a few of the good juicy bits to get people excited.

01:06:45.280 | I think the first thing that comes to mind

01:06:48.720 | is what really propelled this into a different stratosphere,

01:06:52.320 | which was for the Plaza Hotel.

01:06:54.720 | I was on break, and I was chatting with my fellow butlers.

01:06:59.600 | And I was just like, "What's the deal with Eloise?"

01:07:01.680 | There's the Eloise Children's book about how she lives in the Plaza Hotel.

01:07:05.040 | And he was like, "Oh, yeah, it's a really big deal.

01:07:07.040 | Everyone loves Eloise here."

01:07:08.400 | One time, a room called and asked for a butler

01:07:11.120 | to bring up the Eloise book and read them a bedtime story

01:07:15.680 | to read Eloise as the bedtime story.

01:07:18.400 | And I was like, "Okay, sure, that's a little quirky."

01:07:21.200 | And when we got to the room, there was no child in the room.

01:07:24.400 | There were four adults in their 30s all in the same bed,

01:07:31.360 | like Charlie Bucket's grandparents.

01:07:34.000 | And they were all like, "Okay, read us the story now, please."

01:07:38.560 | And he read them Eloise for 90 minutes.

01:07:44.080 | And they were like, "Thank you, that's all."

01:07:46.000 | And that was the perfect amount of quirkiness

01:07:52.160 | to launch the series into popularity.

01:07:55.920 | And every time I do one of these jobs,

01:07:58.720 | I'm sniffing around for that Eloise moment.

01:08:01.760 | I don't need to tell you about the sex, drugs, and rock and roll

01:08:04.000 | because yeah, it's a private jet on a super yacht.

01:08:07.440 | Are you surprised people are doing sex, drugs, and rock and roll?

01:08:10.400 | No.

01:08:11.120 | Are you surprised that someone is reading four adults

01:08:14.160 | a children's book as a bedtime story?

01:08:16.640 | Yeah, that's more fun.

01:08:17.680 | So I'm trying to find the humor in it.

01:08:19.360 | There's humor.

01:08:20.240 | There's still absurdity.

01:08:21.600 | I read that someone had Fiji water installed in their house,

01:08:25.440 | including their shower.

01:08:27.040 | Someone that spent 10s of thousands of dollars

01:08:29.520 | to raise the height of the sink in their bathroom at a hotel,

01:08:34.400 | which I think you said they literally needed to involve construction equipment.

01:08:38.480 | Yeah, actually, that is one of the other things that I think about often.

01:08:42.800 | It was a hotel in Chicago,

01:08:44.560 | and a couple was going to Chicago for a 3-day weekend.

01:08:49.360 | And the wife called the hotel and was like,

01:08:52.400 | "Do me a favor, measure how high the vanity is off the floor."

01:08:57.040 | They were like, "Okay, yeah, we'll get back to you."

01:08:58.800 | And, "Oh, it's 45 inches."

01:09:00.560 | And she's like, "Hmm, that's not going to do.

01:09:02.400 | It needs to be 52."

01:09:03.760 | And they were like, "Okay, well, we'll raise it,

01:09:06.640 | but it's a marble vanity, so we're going to need to get new marble,

01:09:10.000 | and it'll cost about $55,000."

01:09:12.480 | She's like, "Okay, sounds good."

01:09:14.000 | So they raised it.

01:09:16.080 | She stayed for three nights, and that's all she wrote.

01:09:21.200 | And the reason was she didn't like bending down too far to wash her face.

01:09:28.080 | I don't even have words.

01:09:29.440 | Like, the number of vacations you could take for the cost of raising that sink.

01:09:35.120 | I don't know why she didn't find another hotel that maybe had a higher sink.

01:09:38.080 | It seemed cheaper or easier, but wow.

01:09:40.320 | You worked as a maitre d' at a hot restaurant in New York.

01:09:43.200 | You worked at a hotel.

01:09:44.480 | You worked in a lot of the kinds of places that me, you, people listening,

01:09:49.040 | will end up going to or wanting to go to.

01:09:51.520 | What did you learn when it comes to ways that we might

01:09:54.560 | apply some tricks or some tips or some tactics to get the reservation

01:09:58.960 | at the hard-to-get-to table or to get the upgrade at the hotel

01:10:03.520 | or get the good treatment on the plane from the flight attendants

01:10:06.640 | or something like that?

01:10:08.160 | At Nobu, I spent an afternoon with the reservations team

01:10:13.200 | because I was really curious how to hack that on a personal level.

01:10:17.200 | And they said that the best time to call is at around 4.15 p.m.

01:10:23.760 | because a lot of people do last-minute cancellations.

01:10:29.200 | And they will do it when they see their dinner coming on the horizon.

01:10:34.320 | They realize they're going to be late or someone can't make it.

01:10:38.720 | And that happens before 5, but usually a little bit after 4.

01:10:44.000 | They said right in that 4.15 sweet spot was if you call day of,

01:10:48.800 | you could probably get a table.

01:10:50.480 | I've heard everything from restaurant reservations to even daycare,

01:10:55.920 | where it's like, "Even though we have a waitlist,

01:10:57.760 | we usually just take whoever calls first."

01:11:00.080 | So I imagine that was maybe similar at Nobu.

01:11:03.040 | There might be people that say, "If something opens up, give me a call."

01:11:05.600 | But they're going to prioritize whoever just calls in the moment.

01:11:08.720 | Definitely. I think you can certainly give them a ring and say,

01:11:10.880 | "If anything opens up, give me a call."

01:11:12.160 | And then you need to be proactive.

01:11:13.360 | You need to call at 4.20 or 4.30 and say,

01:11:16.320 | "I'd really like to come in. What can we make happen?"

01:11:19.040 | I think the less constraints you put on that reservation too,

01:11:22.160 | the likelier it is that you'll find a place.

01:11:23.920 | What about tipping?

01:11:26.640 | Is the go up to the maitre d and offer a tip to get a table?

01:11:30.560 | Is that a real thing?

01:11:31.680 | No, I think that's a dated TV show kind of thing.

01:11:35.600 | I don't think that's going to work.

01:11:36.880 | But they do leave tables open for VIPs.

01:11:41.840 | They are ready at a moment's notice.

01:11:43.680 | If Blake Lively walks in the door and she wants a table, they're going to give her one.

01:11:46.800 | So, it's really more about who you know.

01:11:49.280 | One thing that you could do -- everyone's going to hate that I say this --

01:11:54.640 | is everyone's always thinking about concierges at hotels

01:11:58.160 | and the cities that they're going to visit.

01:12:00.000 | Make friends with a concierge at a hotel in the city you live in.

01:12:05.200 | Because a lot of times, what people will do is they will hold tables for concierge friends

01:12:14.160 | at a Four Seasons or at a St. Regis or something like that.

01:12:18.720 | So that when they have a big spender come and stay at the hotel,

01:12:22.640 | they can funnel them a table right away.

01:12:24.240 | So, go to a hotel in your hometown and try to make friends with the concierge there.

01:12:31.600 | And that'll often work.

01:12:34.720 | How would you suggest doing that?

01:12:36.640 | How would you make friends with the concierge?

01:12:38.880 | I honestly think that you could just go in and ask.

01:12:44.640 | A lot of times, a concierge will say, "Oh, I'm sorry.

01:12:48.320 | We only serve people in the hotel," or something like that.

01:12:52.240 | But a lot of them are really skilled.

01:12:57.120 | And they're really well trained in the art of the concierge service,

01:13:01.760 | especially the ones with the clés d'or, the golden keys that are on their lapel.

01:13:06.000 | And sometimes they really want something to do that is germane to their skill set.

01:13:14.240 | And so they will help you because these days, they're underused.

01:13:17.840 | It's a lot of, "Oh, can you send my bags up to my room?"

01:13:20.560 | Or the things that they don't get much joy in doing,

01:13:22.720 | which is illuminating the destination for their guests.

01:13:25.600 | Okay, so that's the plan.

01:13:28.080 | Maybe make a reservation at a hotel restaurant and get there an hour early

01:13:31.120 | and spend some time with the concierge.

01:13:33.120 | You mentioned earlier bringing gifts while you're traveling.

01:13:36.000 | Not tipping, but is there a gift or something nice to bring to service people

01:13:40.160 | that might be better than a tip in any case?

01:13:43.280 | Yeah.

01:13:44.720 | All the flight attendants told me that they responded really well to bribery.

01:13:48.160 | And you could make an argument that if you learn your service names,

01:13:51.600 | and you learn your flight attendants' names, that it endears them a little bit more to you.

01:13:56.880 | But they really respond to candy.

01:13:59.520 | They don't get to eat the stuff that's on the flight.

01:14:02.240 | They eat something different.

01:14:03.840 | And there are systems in place where pilots and flight attendants

01:14:08.320 | are all eating different things just in case the food is bad and everyone gets sick.

01:14:14.320 | There's always someone on the plane that's able to control the situation.

01:14:18.160 | They tend to eat pretty poorly.

01:14:20.640 | It's a lot of easily transportable stuff, bags of chips and things like that.

01:14:26.800 | So I bet if you brought a healthy snack for a flight attendant, they would really appreciate it.

01:14:34.400 | I would also dress the part.

01:14:36.640 | And this is something that I think a lot of people have said before.

01:14:39.520 | I always wear black on an airplane because if something spills on me, you can't see it.

01:14:45.360 | And it makes you look cleaner.

01:14:48.080 | Black always tends to read chic.

01:14:51.520 | Colors tend to read pajamas.

01:14:54.560 | And people don't really dress up for plane travel the way they used to.

01:14:59.920 | And I think if you present yourself more agnostically,

01:15:04.480 | your ability to say right before everyone's boarding,

01:15:09.360 | "Oh, is there room in Comfort Plus or Premium Economy?"

01:15:12.560 | They will size you up because

01:15:13.920 | if they're moving people to the front of the plane, they want them to look good.

01:15:17.760 | Has that worked?

01:15:19.280 | Have you been upgraded on a flight in the moment?

01:15:22.320 | I definitely have.

01:15:24.400 | And sometimes it's just asking at the right moment.

01:15:27.520 | If there's a line and they're servicing 50 people in front of you, there's no chance in hell.

01:15:33.200 | But if no one's there, the plane's boarding,

01:15:37.360 | you can tell by looking at the seat plan on your app of how many seats there are.

01:15:42.400 | If you can tell that it seems like there's not a lot of people boarding, yeah, just ask.

01:15:46.720 | I mean, especially for something like Comfort Plus on Delta.

01:15:49.840 | If there's an empty seat, it certainly doesn't hurt to ask if the gate agents are not busy.

01:15:56.400 | In the intro, I talked about this book you wrote.

01:15:58.320 | And I want to make sure we touch on it because it's pretty crazy.

01:16:04.000 | I looked at your Amazon author biography, and it's like

01:16:07.040 | 40 Lonely Planets and a book about murder, mutiny in the South Pacific.

01:16:11.840 | And I was like, "Oh, that's okay."

01:16:13.360 | And I dug in.

01:16:14.240 | And first off, I learned that there's a part of the world I've never even heard of,

01:16:18.560 | the Picarin Islands.

01:16:20.000 | Talk a little bit about what drove you to write this book, what it is, who it's for.

01:16:24.080 | I found it fascinating.

01:16:26.720 | And I talked to my wife about it, and she's like, "Can I read that next?"

01:16:29.760 | So I'd love you to share a little bit more.

01:16:31.520 | Yeah.

01:16:32.640 | When I worked at Lonely Planet, we definitely traded in obscure geography.

01:16:36.640 | We'd all traveled the world.

01:16:38.800 | And we were all looking for these weird points on the map that no one else had heard of.

01:16:44.320 | And Picarin was a name that kept coming up because you can't get there using commercial conveyance.

01:16:50.240 | But people live on this remote island.

01:16:53.280 | And it is one of the most remotely inhabited islands in the world.

01:16:57.120 | And only 48 people live there.

01:16:59.280 | It's in the middle of the South Pacific, halfway between New Zealand and Peru,

01:17:05.440 | if that gives you any sense of how vast and forgotten this place is.

01:17:10.080 | And the only way to get there is by cargo freighter.

01:17:12.560 | And a freighter services the island four times a year,

01:17:15.520 | once every season.

01:17:16.480 | And you can travel on the freighter if there's room.

01:17:20.000 | And you can stay until the next time the freighter comes to make a delivery.

01:17:24.160 | And I had traveled extensively through Papua New Guinea on my own

01:17:31.200 | with the help of someone who works in the industry.

01:17:33.920 | And she reached out to me one day a few years later and was like,

01:17:36.640 | "There's an opportunity to send one journalist to this very forgotten island."

01:17:41.920 | And I knew it because of my time at Lonely Planet.

01:17:44.560 | So she arranged for my transfer on the cargo freighter.

01:17:48.960 | And I ended up spending some time there living amongst these 48 individuals

01:17:52.960 | who, of course, there's no hotel.

01:17:54.640 | Because how do you get there to stay in a hotel?

01:17:56.960 | There's no restaurant.

01:17:57.920 | So you're just living in these people's homes.

01:17:59.680 | And I went thinking I was going to write an article for Travel and Leisure magazine.

01:18:04.320 | And I did.

01:18:05.200 | But when I left the island,

01:18:07.040 | I was just completely obsessed with everything that I learned while I was there

01:18:13.200 | about the people who live there today and about the history.

01:18:16.320 | And usually, when I take on a project for work, I fall in love with the destination.

01:18:21.360 | I marry it.

01:18:22.400 | I make the article.

01:18:24.880 | And then I go and fall in love with something else.

01:18:27.280 | And Peg Karen was this place that I just kept thinking about and thinking about.

01:18:31.280 | And all the characters involved in the founding of the island

01:18:35.520 | and all the characters that live there today could all have their own articles.

01:18:40.560 | And I realized I needed to write like a 100,000-word article,

01:18:46.240 | which, of course, is a book.

01:18:47.280 | So it wasn't until after I got back from Peg Karen that I was just like,

01:18:53.680 | "Okay, I gotta keep researching.

01:18:56.000 | I need to know the truth about this place.

01:18:57.520 | I need to know all the details about how it was founded 200 years ago

01:19:01.600 | and why it's such a crazy place to visit now."

01:19:05.920 | Peg Karen is the kind of place that once you know three sentences about it,

01:19:10.960 | you're going to be instantly obsessed

01:19:12.560 | because the island was founded about 200 years ago

01:19:15.600 | when these British sailors mutinied against their captain,

01:19:18.880 | threw them overboard, stole the ship, and disappeared with their Tahitian brides.

01:19:25.280 | And for 20 years, no one knew where they went.

01:19:27.840 | They thought the ship had vanished, essentially.

01:19:30.720 | And then they were discovered living on an island that was previously uninhabited.

01:19:35.280 | But of all the men and women that went to the island,

01:19:40.400 | there was only one man left when they found the island 18 years later.

01:19:46.720 | And it turned out that it was like a real-life game of Survivor

01:19:50.640 | where they were, instead of voting each other off the island,

01:19:56.560 | they were murdering each other.

01:19:58.240 | And there were alliances that formed.

01:20:00.880 | There was jealousy and secrets.

01:20:03.440 | And one by one, they plotted and killed each other.

01:20:06.400 | When they were escaping an oppressive world, they then created an oppressive world.

01:20:11.760 | And before they were all murdered, some of them had kids with each other.

01:20:15.840 | And then it's those descendants, those seventh-generation descendants

01:20:20.400 | of the original mutineers that still live there today.

01:20:23.840 | And they're haunted by the trauma of the island's founding.

01:20:29.200 | And so my book zippers the two timelines together.

01:20:35.920 | So it seesaws back and forth one chapter present day, one chapter 200 years ago.

01:20:42.400 | And as the story goes on, the two timelines get more and more intertwined.

01:20:47.840 | And suddenly, they're completely overlapping.

01:20:50.480 | And there's this pendulum swing of cause and effect.

01:20:53.840 | Against the two, of course, it sort of ends with a bang,

01:20:56.640 | because by the end of at least the 200-year-old timeline, everyone's dead.

01:21:01.360 | That's wild.

01:21:02.800 | The book's fantastic.

01:21:04.240 | Rarely, if ever, do I know of a book that's like a thriller mystery, enthralling story,

01:21:10.240 | but just also happens to be one of the craziest true stories of all time

01:21:15.040 | and weaves in a travel narrative as well.

01:21:17.520 | It's fantastic.

01:21:18.480 | Definitely check it out.

01:21:19.840 | I could do a whole nother episode just learning about that island, though.

01:21:23.600 | I don't think it fits in with the theme of the show.

01:21:25.520 | So to wrap up, we talked about a lot of places.

01:21:29.840 | I want you to pick a place that you feel like you're familiar with,

01:21:34.640 | which unfortunately, for all the guidebooks you've written, might be too many.

01:21:37.360 | And leave us with a few things.

01:21:39.280 | A place or two that people should go eat.

01:21:41.120 | A place or two that people should get a drink.

01:21:42.720 | And just an activity that they might not think to do.

01:21:45.520 | I want this to be really useful.

01:21:47.840 | I want there to be value here.

01:21:49.200 | And I want to pick two places because they're both really popular.

01:21:52.480 | I want to start with Iceland because it's really close to the US and to Europe.

01:21:58.960 | And it's a really big impact destination because once you touch down,

01:22:02.880 | it looks like another planet.

01:22:04.720 | The thing is, is everyone does it wrong.

01:22:06.480 | I want to tell you, take a month and see all of Iceland.

01:22:09.120 | We don't all have a month.

01:22:10.560 | So if you have four days, spend one of them in Reykjavik.

01:22:14.960 | People often do the opposite.

01:22:16.480 | They usually base themselves in Reykjavik and then do one day in the countryside.

01:22:20.480 | Flip the script.

01:22:21.360 | Stay outside of the city.

01:22:23.920 | Venture into the city for one day.

01:22:26.400 | It's a teeny tiny city of 250,000 people.

01:22:29.600 | There's some cool cafes and whatnot.

01:22:32.000 | But the reason you're there is not for the urban environment.

01:22:35.840 | You're there for the nature.

01:22:37.440 | I think you should forget the golden circle, which is just a marketing thing.

01:22:42.000 | Go your own way up to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula.

01:22:45.680 | It's a loop.

01:22:46.560 | You can loop the peninsula.

01:22:48.080 | There's really cool places to stay like Hotel Eielson.

01:22:51.280 | It's spelt like Eagleson.

01:22:52.960 | It's a beautiful little boutique inn.

01:22:55.280 | I highly recommend it.

01:22:56.640 | There's a great restaurant right across the street from that hotel.

01:23:01.040 | That's a whole evening unto itself.

01:23:02.880 | I think you should explore some of the public pools.

01:23:06.800 | There's a lot of Blue Lagoon and all these commoditized luxury spa experiences.

01:23:12.960 | The public pools have the same geothermal water and they're $8 rather than $80.

01:23:19.440 | That's an opportunity where you get to meet locals.

01:23:21.360 | People go to the pool every day and they want to talk.

01:23:23.840 | Awesome.

01:23:25.680 | What's the other place?

01:23:26.880 | I think we're all desperate to go back to Japan or go to Japan for the first time.

01:23:33.760 | I love it there.

01:23:38.640 | I just feel passionate about Japan.

01:23:41.760 | And I would love for people to focus on Tokyo in the southwest part of the city.

01:23:49.760 | The Yamanote Line is a ring line that goes around the city by rail.

01:23:55.280 | And a lot of people tend to stick to that line.

01:23:57.440 | I would encourage you to get out of it in the southwest quadrant.

01:24:01.200 | You want to be in Setagaya.

01:24:02.800 | That's the part of the city you want to be in.

01:24:05.200 | You're going to find super cool neighborhoods out there like Shimokitazawa, Daikanyama,

01:24:13.440 | Jiyugaoka.

01:24:14.640 | These are places that you should just go, put your feet down, walk the streets.

01:24:19.600 | You're going to find really cool little restaurants, tea houses.

01:24:24.000 | This is everything that Brooklyn wishes it could be.

01:24:28.240 | Anything specific to check out?

01:24:32.000 | So when you're in Shimokitazawa, for example, what you want to do is you want to go to everyone's

01:24:36.320 | favorite coffee shop called Bear Pond.

01:24:39.360 | They make the best espresso, I promise you.

01:24:43.600 | Everyone who's gone has absolutely loved it.

01:24:46.160 | And take that walking around.

01:24:49.120 | Everyone in Japan is okay with walking with your beverage now.

01:24:52.480 | They used to not be.

01:24:53.600 | And you're going to want to walk through that neighborhood.

01:24:55.600 | You're going to want to look at the street fashion.

01:24:57.360 | You're going to want to go into the vintage boutiques.

01:25:00.560 | You're going to want to see the clothes are just so well-maintained and super stylish.

01:25:05.280 | And if you want to understand what's avant-garde street style, it's there.

01:25:08.880 | If you pop over to Daikanyama, it's a little bit more high-end.

01:25:12.560 | There's a bookshop in Daikanyama, Tsutaya.

01:25:15.200 | It's three white buildings connected by bridges.

01:25:17.680 | Maybe the best bookshop in the entire world.

01:25:21.120 | There's a cafe inside of it as well.

01:25:23.280 | Beautiful magazines, beautiful books.

01:25:26.160 | There are things that you can bring home and put on your coffee table.

01:25:28.560 | That's awesome.

01:25:29.280 | I am ready to go back to Japan.

01:25:31.360 | Before we wrap, where can people follow all the stuff you're doing, writing,

01:25:35.840 | posting photos and everything?

01:25:38.160 | Go to my personal website.

01:25:40.080 | That's brandimpressor.com.

01:25:42.080 | I tend to post my new articles there.

01:25:44.640 | I have a link to my book, The Fire Land, there as well.

01:25:47.840 | You can follow me on Instagram @brandpress.

01:25:51.040 | Awesome.

01:25:52.560 | Thank you so much for being here.

01:25:54.320 | Thank you so much for having me.

01:25:55.280 | This is so much fun.

01:25:58.000 | I really hope you enjoyed this episode.

01:25:59.840 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:26:01.600 | If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

01:26:06.560 | I would really appreciate it.

01:26:08.160 | And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi,

01:26:12.080 | I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

01:26:16.320 | That's it for this week.

01:26:17.360 | I'll see you next week.

01:26:18.880 | [Music]

01:26:29.760 | you