Good morning. August is nearing it’s close, schools are slowly turning the lights back on while families return from their travels to prepare for all the fall activity arriving. I did touch grass and found it comforting. I just might give it another go. So let’s enjoy the lackadaisical summer finish with some relative ease.

Be First —

Spirit is bankrupt. And thus the tranches of Spirit’s old data was recently purchased by Google for the low price of $10M. Google won access to 100M emails and 500M Microsoft Teams chats, spreadsheets, calendars, marketing, productivity and operations data. This is a first for Google. The announcement of the data acquisition from Spirit caused a few waves, mainly due to privacy concerns over the handling of customer / employee data.

The latest Spirit bankruptcy court filing states that the data acquired will be de-identified — claiming that it won't be associated with individual people and that Google agrees not to attempt to re-identify any users.

But what I find fascinating is — why was this purchase action issued by Google and not the likes of an OTA or a rival airline? The depth of granularity in Spirit’s operation is extremely valuable. Spirit’s à la carte approach to flying might have been a nuisance for customers but rich for industry. A data gold mine that travel industry was potentially sitting on. $10M for Google can be ignored as a rounding error however that same $10M can also be considered a rounding error from the likes of Expedia or Delta. So why did Google purchase the data from the now defunct Spirit Airlines?

AI.

Shocking, I know. Google plans to use this data to improve it’s products and AI models. We must ask, what is Google building? Possibly an AI travel companion or something of the like? Whatever it may be, it will be well worth greater than $10M and probably would have been better suited and utilized within the travel sectors’ grip.

Be Smarter —

I haven’t thought about my passport photo since I was a young adult yet over the weekend the FT published an interesting article about the new trend of passport photo photography. Individuals are now seeking to develop the “perfect” passport photo. Why? Because travel is one thing, but traveling in style is another 😎. Happy Beginnings, founded in New York by Thomas Tran is taking portraits that are suitable for passport photo uploads by using a Polaroid Big Shot camera.

Is there a larger market opportunity, I asked myself? Does a passport photography market exists beyond the normal parameters we are aware of? What could the growth projection be for such a business idea that is birthed with almost no attention but soon emerges vital and then to be cemented in the market? Sometimes that’s how an idea truly solidifies - beginning in a minuscule studio on an uninterrupted NYC street side corner.

Let’s breakdown the market segment:

Focusing on block (1) and (2) presents an opportunity in which a software can be developed to expand on what Happy Beginnings is offering but perhaps on a larger scale and yielding similar results. The market could sprout.

Happy Beginnings is possibly onto something valuable. If so, Happy Beginnings should capitalize on. We can be myopic and hold a mentality that if you aren’t building data centers on the moon, you aren’t innovating or returning value. A great innovation that returns value advance from a rather mundane activity that suddenly becomes cool and considerably, smart.

Or Cheat —

Just a couple of weeks ago, Zoe Galanis of On Coastal Tourism crafted a well thought out piece about how social platforms like Instagram and TikTok funnel travelers toward the same viral hotels, beaches, and experiences because algorithms optimize for what captures attention, not for what actually makes a trip meaningful. Galanis asserts that there is real value in travel advisors: not simply booking what a traveler already found online, but introducing them to what they haven’t found — drawing on context, perspective, and personal knowledge of the client that a recommendation feed can’t replicate.

This affects many areas especially in Bahamas. I took some time to highlight the occupancy rates are grossly higher at mega-resorts Baha Mar region against the “family islands” which are too rich in history and hospitality yet hidden and can soon be categorized as cheated if the algorithm continues to dominate.

The variance in the occupancy rates are not directly due to the algorithms redirections. But can a correlation be formed if studied deliberated long enough. Let’s take a think and return back.

Till next week, you know the drill ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

Wesley Warshawer discovered, somewhere in early adulthood, that the life he had been living was smaller than he thought—not smaller in ambition, but smaller in aperture, a life conducted almost entirely within the frequencies of people who already agreed with him. Most people have this discovery once, if at all, and spend the rest of their lives quietly resisting its implications. Warshawer had it early and then, more unusually, kept having it, on a rolling basis, for the better part of two decades.

The first version arrived in India, where he went at nineteen on a study-abroad semester that he now describes, with the mild embarrassment of someone recalling an old crush, as the beginning of everything. The revelations were not the grand kind. They arrived in supermarkets, in the ordinary friction of buying groceries in a system that assumed nothing he assumed. This is, if you think about it, a very unglamorous way to have your worldview rearranged—no mountaintop, no monsoon epiphany, just the slow accumulation of small corrections—but it seems to have worked on him the way it works on almost no one: permanently.

He kept going. A Fulbright took him to Seoul, into a graduate cohort of four hundred and fifty students drawn from sixty-five countries, which is its own kind of bubble-puncturing, a room in which no majority holds. Then came the part of the story that reads, at first, like a betrayal of the theme: a job in Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry, a return to comfort, a settling in among people who had all arrived at more or less the same conclusions about the world by more or less the same routes.

It was there, oddly, that the second and more interesting epiphany found him. In 2017, he came across a set of statistics—about the electorate, about religion, about guns—that described an America he did not recognize from his desk in California. The dissonance was not political so much as geographic: he had spent years learning to be a stranger in Delhi and Seoul while becoming, without noticing, a stranger to Biloxi and Bismarck. So he did the thing that people who take their own epiphanies seriously sometimes do, which is act on it years later, inconveniently, when a pandemic finally handed him the excuse. He gave up the apartment. He got in the car.

What followed was eighteen months of a version of America that doesn’t often show up in the feeds of the people who might read this sentence—small towns, red counties, conversations conducted not to win but to understand—followed by three more years scattered across Latin America, Colombia among them, and Africa, and Europe, the itinerary of a man for whom home had become less a place than a habit he was trying to break.

The résumé, laid flat, could read like restlessness. It reads instead, in his telling, like method. The bubble, for Warshawer, is not a metaphor to be deployed once and retired; it is a condition that reconstitutes itself the moment you stop paying attention, wherever you happen to be standing. Leave it in one direction—geographic, national, ideological—and it simply re-forms in another, waiting for the next departure to reveal it. This is either an exhausting way to live or the only honest one, and Warshawer, to his credit, seems less interested in litigating which than in proving, trip after trip, that the discomfort is where the information is.

Good morning. It looks like we are back to the good ole movie references, this time it’s in remembrance of Ms. Hayden Panettiere. Although I hadn’t placed it at the time, I forgotten that Hayden played the young, football-loving daughter of Coach Bill Yoast in the movie, Remember the Titans, Sheryl Yoast. Sheryl loves the game, the team and expects all players, on both sides, to play with respect and dignity for each other. The same way we love and treat the travel + hospitality sector here at PMIPT. Rest well, Hayden.

Be First —

Is anybody betting on flights? Betting, not in a loose manner, but actually betting on flights. The prediction markets, which is this generation’s sanitary word for betting, is flying a bit too close to the sun.

FlightAware just filed a lawsuit in New York against the prediction market giant, Kalshi (Case No.: 1:26-cv-06824). At it’s core, FlightAware is alleging that Kalshi is offering bets on cancelled flights and presenting these bets as “verified from FlightAware”. This is trademark and reputation issue plus data source violation for FlightAware. Kalshi is already viewed as gambling in many states, especially in New York. Mike Pierce of In Debt, covers even the larger issue of growing debt loads with Gen-Z mainly due to the surge of gambling and sports betting. The behavior is worth noting that according to Bloomberg, Gen-Z is moving away from stocks and into sports betting in wealth plans.

Should our next 2 hour delayed flight be included in this bucket? Should we all open up a Kalshi account, only book our flights during hurricanes and tornadoes, bet on our flight cancellation, earn some dinero along our non-changable ticket voucher? Or should we join together, combine our “wagers”, and devise an elaborate scheme to hack into Crowdstrike and disrupt IT services similarly in 2024 when over 5K flights were cancelled? Be first to find out on the next episode of Dragon Ball-Z.

What may come of this filing remains to be seen and I wonder how our industry will respond. I think it’s important to watch and compare the impact or influence sports betting has had on the sports industry which could play out similarly if betting grows deeper in the aviation sector. Individuals driven to earn more on the platform could seek to act in extremely harmful ways for the simple sake of winning a bet. Aviation mechanics, pilots and passengers become collateral damage to markets and earnings. No matter what happens, you can trust that I haven’t been bought out. I retired my pup with the $20 I won in Puerto Rico at my first ever and last slot machine at 18. Been living the dream ever since.

I have attached the complaint, thoroughly read through it, highlighting some parts of the complaint that were distinct. I encourage readers to take a read through as well.

Case No.: 1:26-cv-06824

Be Smarter —

This past week, PMIPT covered the Samsonite purchase of Beis Luggage in Overhead Bin, Overtaken. $178.5M for 85% while the remaining 15% will sit at the brand focused venture firm, Beach House Group. Beis will remain standalone, at least for now. I found this acquisition extremely smart & necessary for Samsonite. For starters, it is their first acquisition in 10 years since the Tumi closing, in which Samsonite shelled out $1.8B. And for a company sitting under the PE firm, CVC — I can imagine that there exists market share conversations about Samsonite these days. So for about 11% of the acquisition cost of Tumi, Samsonite secured the younger, largely female consumer base that are looking for a luggage home. Most of us buy luggage once every ten years, and securing the next generation is vital. Tumi and more premium brands are slower to capture and adapt from their already pre - existing forms.

Or Cheat —

The US bought a boatload of Yen, estimated around $5B-$10B. Now you might be thinking, “so what?”. Perhaps, I should lead with “don’t worry your Japan trips will remain cheap”. That’s how you get the people going 😂 .

I want ensure that we understand why this US action matters. The yen hit a 40 year low, climbing to 164 yen two weeks ago. Why? Oil prices are rising all over the globe, Japan especially. All due to the Iran war since Japan imports nearly all of its oil. US steps in, at least reportedly, as a “gesture of goodwill”. One could label this a cheat, but I am opposed to that framing for two reasons:

1. The gesture didn’t really work as the yen dipped slightly to 157 yen, and is back to 159 yen.

2. The Iran war was the direct cause of US action.

Therefore the goodwill makes sense and given the strong relationship between Japan & the United States, it seems justified to assist the yen. Japan’s inbound tourism numbers are increasing for several factors including the exchange rate, especially for US visitors, as a driving advantage. I don’t for see the US to ever consider the purchasing or not purchasing of yen for travel related reasons but its after effects are at least understood.

Again, rest well, Hayden, you will be missed and till next week ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

The acquisition is worth dwelling on precisely because of who the buyer is. Samsonite is the incumbent whose century-old wholesale model Béis’s entire strategy was built to route around — the company that, through Samsonite, Tumi, and American Tourister, still commands roughly a fifth of the global luggage market and generates some $3.6 billion in annual revenue. That the largest legacy player in the category has now paid nine figures to acquire, rather than out-innovate, one of its DTC challengers is itself a verdict on the last eight years of the luggage business: distribution scale no longer beats digital-native brand equity, so incumbents are buying the equity instead. Béis is one of a small cohort of upstarts — alongside Away and Monos — that spent the past decade capturing meaningful share by exploiting a structural weakness in how legacy players sell luggage: through wholesale channels that add 40 to 50 percent in markup before a bag ever reaches a customer. Béis is now the first of the three to convert that share gain into an exit.

Béis was founded in October 2018 by the actress Shay Mitchell, in partnership with Beach House Group, the brand incubator run by PJ Brice and Shaun Neff that also built Millie Bobby Brown’s beauty line. Mitchell, who serves as Chief Creative Officer rather than CEO, has been candid that the company was never designed to be “Béis by Shay Mitchell” — a positioning choice that turns out to matter more than it sounds. It let the brand build equity independent of its founder’s fame, a hedge that Away, whose early identity was inseparable from its two co-founders, did not have when a 2019 report on its workplace culture damaged the brand’s standing.

That founder-distance is one of three structural decisions separating Béis from its two closest DTC rivals — decisions worth examining as a case study in category strategy rather than as competing lifestyle brands.

Away raised more than $100 million in venture funding on its way to scale and, by most accounts, took years to approach sustainable profitability, a common trade-off for DTC brands chasing growth-at-all-costs. Béis raised just $12.5 million and has reportedly been profitable since its earliest operations — an outcome achieved by keeping its cost base disciplined and by avoiding the marketing-spend arms race that inflated Away’s customer acquisition costs. Monos followed a version of Béis’s playbook, growing from $8 million in revenue in 2020 to over $150 million in 2024 while remaining comparatively capital-light.

Away spent years as a DTC-only brand before diversifying; Béis launched into Nordstrom on day one, hedging its digital-native identity with wholesale credibility and physical retail exposure from the start. Monos took a middle path, opening a small footprint of five U.S. stores — in Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. — while shipping the bulk of its inventory directly from contract manufacturers, cutting delivery times to seven to ten days versus the 30 to 45 days legacy retailers absorb through container shipping. Each brand, in other words, chose a different point on the spectrum between digital purity and physical presence, and each bet has paid dividends differently: Away’s early DTC-only stance built brand mythology but limited discovery; Monos’s lean store footprint builds tactile trust in a category where customers want to touch the product before buying; Béis’s day-one wholesale play sacrificed some DTC margin purity for faster, broader reach.

@beisWe’ve upgraded our rollers. Here’s a side-by-side look at what changed.

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Béis prices its carry-on at $218, meaningfully below Away’s $295, while pushing new collections — totes, backpacks, diaper bags, gym bags — at a cadence closer to a streetwear label’s drop calendar than a traditional luggage company’s seasonal reset. That velocity does two things a slower catalog cannot: it keeps the brand perpetually fresh in a feed-driven purchase environment, and it de-risks the business from any single product’s durability complaints by diversifying revenue across dozens of SKUs. When durability criticism surfaced on social media, Béis converted the complaint into content and revenue rather than crisis management, launching the Béis Wash, a free luggage-cleaning pop-up that reportedly became one of its highest-grossing events of the year — a marketing instinct neither Away nor Monos has replicated at the same scale.

For years, the assumption in DTC luggage circles was that these companies were building toward an IPO, à la Away’s abortive 2021 flirtation with going public, or toward indefinite independence, à la Monos’s continued private growth. Béis’s outcome — an acquisition by the exact incumbent its strategy was designed to undercut — suggests a third, more pragmatic model: build a capital-efficient, profitable brand with a loyal following, then sell the growth engine to a company that already owns the sourcing infrastructure, international distribution, and manufacturing scale a DTC brand would otherwise spend a decade building on its own. Samsonite’s own language around the deal is telling: the company says it expects the transaction to have minimal near-term impact on profitability, with efficiencies to be realized over time as Béis “gains access to Samsonite’s scale, sourcing capabilities and global infrastructure” — an admission that Béis had already solved the harder problem, brand and demand, and simply needed the industrial back end that Samsonite has in abundance. Lifestyle bags, notably, account for roughly half of Béis’s sales, meaning Samsonite isn’t just buying a luggage brand; it’s buying entry into the adjacent bag categories — totes, backpacks, diaper bags — that traditional luggage makers have struggled to crack.

For Away and Monos, the deal changes the competitive calculus. Away, still independently owned and still working to rebuild the brand equity dented by its 2019 controversy, now faces a rival with the balance sheet of the industry’s largest player behind it — Béis’s marketing budget, sourcing costs, and international shelf space could all improve materially once Samsonite integration begins. Monos, which has pointedly stayed capital-light and founder-controlled, becomes the most conspicuous holdout among the three, and the one now most likely to be read by the market as the next acquisition target, whether by Samsonite or a rival like VF Corporation or Compagnie Financière Richemont, both of which have circled premium travel brands in recent years.

The durability question that has dogged all three DTC challengers — independent testing in 2026 found none of them yet matches the multi-decade warranty record of an old-guard brand like Travelpro, and that the “lifetime warranty” language common to Away, Monos, and Béis alike routinely produces discount offers rather than true no-questions-asked replacement — may turn out to be the deal’s quiet rationale. Samsonite’s engineering and supply-chain depth is precisely what could close that gap for Béis in a way no amount of Instagram spend could. Whether that turns Béis into the category’s most credible full-stack challenger, or whether the acquisition slowly sands off the founder-led scrappiness that built the brand’s following in the first place, is the question that will determine whether this deal reads, in five years, as Samsonite’s smartest acquisition or its most expensive attempt to buy a culture it can’t actually absorb.

Good morning. August can seem a bit of a slug. No boom, no bang. However we are smarter than that, right? Rightttttttt 😵‍💫 It’s in these seemingly mute days that there exists subtle movements occurring under the blanket of this quiet covering. Or rather, above us in the sky.

Be First —

An object of the rich and famous, private flying is growing in it’s popularity and thus any related services. I was reading the journal this weekend and found an interesting statistic — there are now roughly 430K U.S. households worth $30 million or more, and as that number has grown, so has the industry of services catering to wealthy travelers who want to skip the hassles of commercial flying.

New entrants and models have emerged as well. Fractional jet ownership, and “jet-pooling” have become en vogue. Membership programs such as Bond, which is offering heated stone floors on their jets essentially allowing your feet to stay warm while you are in your PJs on your PJ. It’s something new but it is competing with NetJets and Flexjet. Ugh, not those basic billys.

The underset — planes are expensive both in manufacturing, operating (mainly the fuel) and owning. These small scale private flying firms start off very strong, due to meager size and targeted audience. Soon growth and profitability draw more attention than appearance and exclusivity. Thus meaning, more planes, and more clients. Once the wealthy client pool is tapped out. Time to call up the thousand-aires. Meaning again, more planes, and more clients. Repeat. Eventually, the private flying club shapes itself into a commercial airline. Challenging the balance of private and successful.

I do see a potential opportunity for private flying firms — be first and already bake into the model all participants of the economic pool. Ultra wealthy or not. Tier and cater, and price the flights based off such. Exercise this at the start of the operation not when the PJ firm needs it.

I assure you I won’t be receiving a call anytime soon. I am still in court awaiting my MTA refund for $3.27. Long story for another day.

Be Smarter —

There exist potential for Dulles International (IAD) to receive a much needed update. The projected cost $22B. Trump unveiled the plans last week. But if you know anything about Trump and his renovation pools, ballrooms, arcs—typo, I meant plans—you know that…well…you know…it’s Trump.

Listen, he unveiled the designs and renderings with his own internal pre - approval team. The details show that this project is largely financed through municipal bonds rather than federal funds. Additionally, airlines that operate at Dulles, majorly United Airlines, will cover the costs. It is also worth noting that congress still needs to approve the plan. He tends to forget that congress exist around the corner.

As a travel lover and United baby, I support the designs. Truly it looks nice. 5M square feet sounds great. Airports are a way that each one of us first experience a new culture and place and having up to date entry ways are vital to that experience. Let’s be smart and use the new square footage to be at least, UNCARPETED. Oh and yes, hopefully approved.

Or Cheat —

Brian Chesky announced last week that AI has cut concept-to-delivery time by up to 60% on key initiatives — for example, airport pickups launched in just six weeks, compared to nine months for the company’s groceries business — while boosting product improvements (80%) y/o/y and lowering customer support costs by 16%. In the rental business space, Airbnb is outpacing Expedia (6%) and Booking Holdings (5%). All of this meaning that, AI is providing Airbnb with confidence over its competitors. Airbnb has been pushing into hotels, experiences and services and posting strong financials for Q2, with revenues rising to $3.6B (+17%). I think Airbnb is a great culture for Ai to test it’s importance or lack there of given all of the conflicting rhetoric around Ai’s use cases. It’s a decent cheat for Airbnb since growth projections are always their real struggle. Rolling out a new product faster is one thing, and accomplishment. Making that product profitable and long lasting is another — even for itself.

Till next week ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

Good morning. I want to begin by saying thank you for the kind responses regarding the launch of the Margin Call Newsletter. High fives and hugs all around 🤗 It seems —We are not alone 🛸 Ugh, I know another movie pun for this week — I promise, I’ll go touch grass this week.

Be First —

I spent some time viewing the flight cancellations from last week occurring in the Midwest and the East Coast of the U.S. Why? Well, as a New Yorka, we witnessed one of the worst thunderstorms of the summer. This caused safety concerns for folks on ground and air. Flight cancellations were piling up, the numbers are staggering. However, I want to shift our attention ever so slightly where we can see why the storms are growing more aggressive — heat. More than 165M people were under a heat warning in the U.S. The mechanics are not a simple physics but as I best understand it ~ thinner hot air reduces lift, forcing airlines to delay departures. Hashtag notaphysicist if hashtags are still a thing. Economically, can we infer that heat is also trimming payloads, as for example, ramp crews can't safely work scorching tarmac? Less hours, less earnings, higher insurance coverages at airports, higher fees, higher prices and soon, the dominoes begin to play their part. Let’s not forget about the actual environment, you know the trees and the bees. My cautious read: just as aggressive as these storms are, our industry needs to be equally aggressive and first in addressing climate change, it’s only for our best. At this current rate — let’s track and see how this cancellation to heat index correlation trends over the next year. Who knows, we might be find the magic data point to spark change.

Be Smarter —

Kevin Warsh assumed the FED chair in May 2026. It was a bit of a theatrical transfer when changing seats from Jerome Powell. Warsh may be a Trump install however Warsh’s actual boss are the markets and the monthly governmental data reports. Last week, Warsh held interest rates at 3.5% - 3.75% announced at the July 29 meeting in a 9-3 vote. If this is already boring you — trust me, I’ll make it interesting soon, hang in there with me. FED rates matter and the meetings should be marked on all of our calendars — especially us lovers of the sector. Similar to last week when I brought up BNPL products / behaviors for consumers. Lets now focus on the lowest tier of our industry which also runs on debt. Airlines carry heavy debt loads for aircraft purchases and leases, and hotels finance construction and renovations. Higher-for-longer rates raise the cost of that capital, which can slow fleet expansion, delay new routes, or get passed through as higher fares and room rates. Higher interest rates costs squeeze corporate cash flow, and travel budgets are a common target for cuts. You still there? — cause this is where I think it gets truly interesting. Our Fed policy is a major driver of the dollar's value. A stronger dollar — often tied to higher US rates relative to other countries which makes international trips cheaper for Americans traveling abroad, but makes the US pricier for inbound foreign visitors — a real factor for US tourism-dependent cities and airlines with international routes. See where I’m driving to? — by raising or holding interest rates helps fight inflation but can cool demand, more specifically travel demand (inbound & outbound). And lowering interest rates, is not much of help to fighting inflation although it stimulates spending — something our industry heavily relies on (inbound & outbound). So what’s the smart move? I’m not sure just yet but I am surely open to hearing your thoughts. Trading economics has an interactive tool for tracking the interest rates, I’m sure we can use this to help us draft some unique correlations or speculations. And for anyone wondering, the next FED meeting is September 16th at 2pm EST. Mark your calendars!

Or Cheat —

SkyMiles members are back to earning 1 mile per $1 at Starbucks beginning August 5th — the same flat rate the partnership debuted with in 2022, before Delta got fancy with reload tiers nobody wanted to do math for. The catch: you now need to have actually flown Delta in the past 12 months to keep the miles flowing, because nothing says loyalty like a coffee habit with a milage test. The fine print shows that lapsed flyers get a grace period through October 5th. It’s a neat cheat move for both brands, truly — Starbucks already owns the pre-flight caffeine monopoly at practically every major US airport ~ O'Hare alone has 14 locations ~ so pairing that captive audience with a mileage carrot keeps travelers reaching for the green cup instead of wandering off to Dunkin' out of spite. I honestly like the move even though it doesn’t benefit me — I fly United.

Another Margin Call completed, let’s see how the week develops. Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

The trouble started with screenshots. Indonesian residents who tried to register for Entourage’s events found their applications quietly stalled, while foreign friends and partners with foreign names and phone numbers were approved instantly. Annisa Rahmadani Maclean, an Indonesian woman, said her registration stalled while her husband’s went through at once. When she asked why, a club representative told her the platform was “for digital nomads” — a sentence that meant to describe a visa category and ended up describing a caste.

The founders, identified in local reporting as Joost Storms and Hidde van Vliet, apologized in the way these things now go: a WhatsApp glitch, a statistic about Indonesian participation, and the claim that being a digital nomad “is not defined by nationality.” Some events, they allowed, had been “designed specifically for digital nomads.” Indonesian authorities were unpersuaded. Immigration placed both men on an entry-ban list; they had reportedly already left for Singapore. Hendarsam Marantoko, the country’s immigration director general, was blunt: foreign nationals, he said, have no standing to set exclusionary rules inside someone else’s country. It read less like a scolding than a reminder of the obvious — they are guests.

The reason a jogging club became a national story is that it fits a shape Indonesians already recognized. Since the pandemic, Bali’s foreign population has shifted from backpackers and retirees to a younger, laptop-carrying class living on business visas stretched to cover work they’re not technically allowed to do. They built a parallel economy — co-living spaces, content houses, members-only clubs — transacted mostly in dollars, requiring little of the language beyond ordering coffee. For this crowd, Bali became less a country than scenery.

Officials have started to push back. A new task force, Dharma Dewata, detained sixty-two foreigners in its first three weeks this spring, concentrating patrols in the same nomad enclaves — Canggu, Ubud, Seminyak — where Entourage recruited its members. The government now talks openly about “quality tourism,” which is bureaucratic shorthand for a blunter idea: fewer people treating the island as a stage set.

That framing — colonization dressed as convenience — extends well past running clubs. Balinese villages are still organized through the banjar, the customary council that has long overseen land and water rights, and the subak, the cooperative irrigation system that has shaped rice farming here for a thousand years. A national push to digitize land permits now lets investors apply remotely, cutting out the face-to-face consultation a banjar once required. Above the mountain village of Munduk, a water priest who tends a sacred spring as part of his family’s hereditary duties fields cold offers from developers for land his family has held for generations. The run club’s sign-up form and Bali’s land-permitting system are, in miniature and in aggregate, doing the same thing: sorting decisions away from the people who were here first, with just enough procedural cover to avoid calling it what it is.

What makes the Entourage story travel is less the discrimination itself than the shrug underneath it — the sense that a place can be loved and appropriated in the same breath, sometimes by the same people, sometimes in the same sentence. Nobody set out to build an apartheid jogging club. But a community engineered entirely around the comfort of newcomers will eventually produce that outcome anyway, intentions notwithstanding. An automated filter on a WhatsApp form is a small thing. A permitting system that removes the banjar from the loop is the same instinct at scale.

None of this makes every digital nomad an accidental colonialist. Most pay fair wages, learn enough Indonesian to get by, and understand that being welcomed somewhere is a privilege, not a default setting. But Entourage is now the cautionary version of the story — proof of what happens when a “curated community” curates out the people whose country it’s in. Admitting Indonesians to a running club in Indonesia shouldn’t require a diversity policy. It’s the floor, not an achievement.

Storms and van Vliet are in Singapore. Entourage’s Sunday runs, if they resume, will presumably let anyone jog through the paddies before the mopeds start. The visa gray zones, the online permitting systems, or the customary councils losing their say over land their families have farmed for centuries. The run club was never really the story. It was just the first thing small enough — and human enough — for people to point at.

Below is a list of alternative running clubs presenting in the Bali region.

• Rise Run Club

• Run on Bali

Sponsored by 3137 Capital

Good morning. As PMIPT grows and evolves — the evidence has proven that the travel / hospitality sector is hungry for a market and data collective. As an investor and spectator, more so a fan in the industry, I figured why not include a market section to the weekly editorial to satisfy this hungry for our readers and beyond. But perhaps, this is my way to finally have an healthy excuse to continue to build the plethora of spreadsheets sheltering this information. Let’s dub this newsletter — Margin Call — a homage to one of my favorite movies capturing one of the feathers that collapsed the proverbial camels back in the 2008 financial crisis. Think of a margin call similar to when a bank is calling in a loan because the house you put up as collateral just dropped in value, and they want their cushion back. The travel sector has experienced a few margin calls over the few decades. Some forseen and some black swans but as said in the film —

Be First —

Sonder is back! Ok a bit misleading but TravelAi has acquired the trademark, domain name of Sonder, as a “AI-enabled brand for boutique hotels and urban accommodations”. We covered the theatrical fall of Sonder last year - leaving guests locked out of their room all around the world. In short, many woke up in the middle of the night of their Sonder stay for a bucket of ice and couldn’t access their room once exited. Honestly, I like this new, reduced, potentially honest version of Sonder. From a quasi short term rental company / back-end property management system to now an Ai enabled aggregator fronting accommodation listings featured on OTAs such as Booking.com, Expedia or any partner of Travel Ai. Let’s assume this is a commission based business model and scaling will be heavily dependent on sanitizing the Sonder brand name that enable partnership growth and marketing visibility. Hence, justifying why TravelAi acquired the brand name. This is a first for Sonder, let’s watch how this plays out.

Be Smart —

Buy Now, Pay Later (or BNPL) has fully infiltrated the travel sector — good news for the sector, yes. But lets remain smart, consumer debt is increasing steadily. I remain cautious to its frequency in our world — travel world that is. Debt can be acceptable when you the have cash to back up — but can the economy support that model any longer? Perhaps. Heck, I use my United Airlines credit card for dang near every purchase - why? — miles over everything. If I am ever faced with a choice between the 40 acres and a mule that the government owes myself via my ancestors or the miles equivalent to the such — please understand, I will require much time to think it over 😵‍💫 For each month, travelers are choosing to hold a debt that must be resolved before interest accrues. Reports show that consumer credits are winning the matches. Credit cards are old, relics of an aging generation. BNPL is groovy, funky, and rad 🪩 Travel is a luxury and more so than ever, travel is a statement and must be seen. Most aren’t flush with cash by the time their trip arrives and are financing their exploits. As said in Angelica’s article on PMIPT, ‘Don’t compare yourself to other travelers’ and if you fall for the social comparison - let’s be smart. Trina of CNBC breaks down your BNPL travel options effectively

Or Cheat —

Apparently, United Airlines (UAL) was seeking a merger with Delta Airlines (DAL) last year, 2025, sneaking around to create, potentially, one of the world’s largest airline. A potential market capitalization of $100B. Yes, you read that correctly that is a capital ‘B’. Had the the two firms truly exercise this merger, the new formation would have controlled greater than 50% of the US aviation market. Legal went to work and effectively determined that this merger would get swiftly rejected, even in the hands of this “deal-love making” administration. Soon reported, that United and Delta never proceeded with such an M&A. Can we ask — why United is desperately seeking a merger? United did attempt to purchase American Airlines recently and that deal was rejected by the same administration. Is Kirby purchase happy? I think so. “Look under the sheet of the US3” ~ (United, Delta, & America) is what I say although, I can’t find any meaningful figures pointing to any distress at United or the industry at large but perhaps rather Kirby is trying to buy or out bid any potential threats (industry or economic). Think Disney purchasing high value IPs (Marvel in 2009, Star Wars 2012) or direct competitor (21st Century Fox, 2019). Is this a cheat? — no, but United is certainly glancing around during the test. Folders up!

Well - that’s the first Margin Call till next week. Margin Call will be issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

It is worth pausing on the arithmetic of the thing, because the arithmetic is the story. Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands roughly 385 miles off the coast of Senegal, home to about 530,000 people — fewer than live in Wichita, Kansas. Only Iceland, at the 2018 tournament, had ever sent a smaller population to a World Cup. And yet on October 13, 2025, in front of 15,000 fans crammed into the 8,000-capacity National Stadium in Praia, the Blue Sharks beat Eswatini 3-0 to finish atop a qualifying group that included Cameroon, an eight-time World Cup nation with five Africa Cup titles. Coach Pedro “Bubista” Brito, a former centre-back capped 21 times for his country, had spent the campaign fielding a squad stitched together from the diaspora — Roberto “Pico” Lopes, the team’s defensive anchor, was reportedly recruited via a LinkedIn message. Cape Verde’s federation president called it a victory not just for football, but “for those who fought for our independence.” The timing was not incidental: 2025 marked fifty years since that independence was won.

That history is not a footnote; it is the marrow of the story. Cape Verde was uninhabited until Portuguese sailors arrived in 1456, and for the next five centuries it served, brutally, as a waypoint in the transatlantic slave trade — the old town of Cidade Velha, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, still holds the ruins of one of the earliest European settlements in the tropics. Independence, declared on July 5, 1975, came not from an uprising on the islands themselves but from a guerrilla war waged in neighboring Guinea-Bissau by the PAIGC, the liberation movement founded by Amílcar Cabral — an agronomist-poet whose assassination in 1973 came two years before he could see the flag he’d fought for raised. His portrait still watches over Praia’s streets today, and his old headquarters is now a modest museum. A nation once dismissed, in the words of skeptics at the time, as economically “unviable” spent fifty years proving otherwise. Then it spent one summer proving it again, in front of a global audience of billions.

Once the tournament began, the disbelief compounded. Cape Verde held Spain, the 2010 champions, to a scoreless draw. It clawed back a 2-2 result against Uruguay. It ground out another 0-0 against Saudi Arabia to become the smallest nation in World Cup history to reach the knockout rounds — never winning a match, and somehow needing not to. Then came Argentina, the defending champions, ranked No. 1 in the world, and a match that Sky Sports called the closest thing to the “biggest upset in World Cup history.” Lionel Messi opened the scoring; Deroy Duarte answered. Lisandro Martínez restored the lead deep into extra time; Sidny Lopes Cabral answered that too, curling in what commentators are already calling one of the great goals in tournament history. Cape Verde lost, 3-2. Nobody who watched it would call it a defeat.

The economics arrived almost as fast as the headlines. According to Google Trends data compiled across the tournament, “Cabo Verde holiday” searches rose 1,522 percent, among the largest increases recorded for any World Cup nation. Skift reported that Expedia logged an 800-percent jump in U.S. search volume; TUI’s search traffic for the destination doubled; interest from Japan climbed 110 percent. American searches for “Cabo Verde vacation” specifically were up more than 5,000 percent year-over-year. For context, tourism already accounts for roughly a quarter of Cape Verde’s GDP and about 10 percent of formal employment, with 1.24 million visitors in 2025 alone — arrivals were already climbing 16.8 percent in early 2026, before a ball was kicked.

The opportunity, and the challenge, is conversion. Cape Verde’s tourism economy is heavily European and heavily concentrated: seven countries generate more than 70 percent of arrivals, and roughly 80 percent of bed-nights cluster on just two of the nine inhabited islands, Sal and Boa Vista, known for their pale, wind-combed beaches and all-inclusive resorts. The other seven islands offer something closer to a secret. Santo Antão’s ribbon-thin trails cut through green volcanic valleys that feel untouched by anything. Fogo’s Pico do Fogo, a 2,829-meter active volcano that last erupted in 2014, draws hikers into a landscape that looks lunar. São Vicente carries the musical legacy of Cesária Évora and the “morna” ballads that made her a national icon. And Praia, the capital, holds the weight of it all — museums to Cabral, the fortress ruins of Cidade Velha, streets where the word morabeza, the islands’ particular ethic of warmth toward strangers, isn’t a slogan but a fact of daily life.

Backed by a $75 million World Bank-financed program for resilient tourism and blue-economy development, and a five-year diversification strategy aimed at courting American travelers — currently just 1 percent of foreign hotel guests, despite a sizable U.S.-based diaspora — Cape Verde now has the rarest asset a small economy can be handed: global attention it did not have to buy. Morocco and Croatia offer instructive precedent for how quickly such spikes can fade without follow-through on air connectivity and local infrastructure. But for a nation that spent five centuries as a waypoint for other people’s journeys, the Blue Sharks’ summer suggested something quietly radical — that Cape Verde might finally be the destination, not the stop along the way.

Listen to Lisa Randolph on Pay Me In Plane Tickets Radio

The premise of the Wildlife Divas series is, on its face, simple: BIPOC girls—curious, capable, undaunted by the usual narrative furniture that keeps children of color at the margins of adventure stories—travel the globe engaging with science, conservation, and the animals most in need of saving. But the simplicity is deceptive. Randolph is attempting something that publishing has historically been reluctant to do, which is to suggest, without lecturing, that the fields of STEAM are not foreign territory for Black and brown girls but home ground. “I wanted them to see themselves not as visitors to these stories,” Randolph has said of her young readers, “but as the ones leading them.” It is a modest sentence that carries a fair amount of freight.

The mechanics of the debut book bear this out. The story is organized around Ravenswing Academy and its instructor, Cherie, who assembles a team of five girls, each rendered with the kind of specificity that separates a real character from a diversity placeholder. There is Ebony, the artist and social-media-savvy diva with a wide public following; Kyloni, small in stature and large in vocabulary, an aspiring scientist; Valerie, fluent in technology and rather less fluent in people; Yalani, an engineer-in-training who moonlights as a future skateboard champion; and Storm, a math whiz and bug enthusiast whose name, the book insists, is no accident—she is quick, sharp, and impossible to overlook. Together they fly to Uganda for what the book calls the trip of a lifetime, deploying science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics on their first international mission: the protection of endangered mountain gorillas. Randolph does not let the mission go smoothly. The girls’ trek is interrupted by poachers, and the resulting complication is less a plot device than a fairly accurate rendering of what conservation work in the Virunga region actually entails—stakes that are real, adversaries who are real, and a species whose survival cannot be taken for granted.

What distinguishes Randolph from the shelf of well-meaning diversity-minded children’s authors is the degree to which her fiction has bled into the world it describes. She did not simply invent a fictional gorilla sanctuary and move on; she went to Uganda. She has appeared on Good Morning Uganda, toured internationally with the support of U.S. embassies, and built relationships with the very conservationists her characters are modeled after. The mountain gorilla, a species that numbers only in the low thousands and exists almost entirely within a sliver of contested, volcanic terrain spanning Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is not an obvious subject for a picture book, precisely because its survival is bound up in geopolitics, poaching economics, and public-health crossover risks that Kalema-Zikusoka herself has spent a career untangling. That Randolph’s book found its way into that world, rather than merely gesturing at it from a distance, says something about the seriousness with which she has approached what could have remained a modest publishing project.

There is a lineage here worth noting. Jane Goodall built an empire of empathy by insisting that children could be scientists before they were taught otherwise; Kalema-Zikusoka has spent her career proving that conservation and community health are inseparable in places where humans and gorillas share fragile terrain. Randolph, working in a different register—picture books rather than field studies, adventure rather than data—is nonetheless part of that same tradition: the conviction that saving a species requires, first, convincing a child to care about it, and that the child doing the caring should not have to imagine herself as someone else in order to belong in the story.

Randolph is now at work on the next installment of the series, and it is worth watching what she does with the platform she has built somewhat unexpectedly. Children’s publishing rarely produces figures who move fluidly between embassy tours and gorilla sanctuaries, between bedtime reading and species-survival plans. But conservation, like storytelling, has always depended on unlikely messengers. Randolph, it turns out, is one of them.

The Wildlife Divas Adventure Team: Saving the Endangered Mountain Gorilla

Lisa Randolph

It is a common enough story in rural Uganda — talent arriving in a household with no means to nurture it. What makes Atuheire’s story worth telling in these pages is not the hardship but what he built out of it. In 2005, having earned his teaching credentials, he returned to the shores of Lake Bunyonyi to work with orphaned children, bringing to the task a firsthand understanding of the desperation these children carried. He was soon joined by a childhood friend, Alphonse Twinamatsiko, the seventh of ten children in a subsistence-farming family, who had begun selling banana fibers at the age of eight to pay his own school fees. Two boys who had scraped their way through adolescence became, in adulthood, partners in a project neither could have built alone.

That project, at first, was not a company at all. Alex and Alphonse began teaching informally, then expanded to serve multiple communities, focusing on children affected by poverty, disability, or the loss of parents, while also equipping families with skills in nutrition, hygiene, and income generation. By 2011 the grassroots effort had formalized into the Amatsiko Organization, and in 2014, with the backing of local churches and community leaders, they opened the doors of Amatsiko Preparatory School — built in part to pull children off the streets of nearby Kabale, where idleness was quietly feeding a cycle of petty crime. Today the school provides free education and meals to some four hundred and twenty underprivileged children, sixty of whom live on campus, with the rest housed among approved guardians in the surrounding villages.

The word amatsiko, in the local Rukiga language, means hope. It is a fitting name for what came next. A school, however well run, is only as sustainable as its funding, and grants and goodwill have a way of running dry. So Atuheire and Twinamatsiko did something audacious for two men without capital or connections: they started a tour company. Amatsiko Tours does not merely show visitors Uganda’s gorillas and crater lakes — it tries to connect them to the country, threading each itinerary through the school and the villages that surround it.

The mechanics of that promise are concrete rather than sentimental. Twenty per cent of the company’s profits go directly toward community support — the school, family assistance, conservation work. A portion of every booking funds teacher salaries, learning materials, and infrastructure at Amatsiko Preparatory School, while also reaching the local guides, farmers, and artisans a traveler meets along the way. Guests who take the company’s “Gorilla Trek and Give Back” package spend their mornings in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, tracking one of the world’s remaining mountain gorilla families, and their afternoons in a classroom, or a banana grove, or a beekeeper’s yard. Visitors have described watching Atuheire tend a beehive with what one called patience and respect, then, hours later, sitting down to a meal cooked over coal fires with a local grandmother, learning to braid a bangle between courses.

This is the quiet argument Amatsiko makes with its itineraries: that tourism, so often an extractive industry — dollars spent, photographs taken, little left behind — can be reorganized around reciprocity instead. Community-based tourism, as it is practiced here, replaces the large lodge and the rushed circuit of parks with something slower: homestays around Lake Bunyonyi, cooking classes in the Kabale and Kisoro districts, afternoons at a women’s craft cooperative, evenings of village storytelling under an equatorial sky. The gorillas remain the draw — few travelers cross an ocean without wanting to see them — but the company has made a wager that what visitors will remember, years later, is not the animal in the mist but the child who taught them a word in Rukiga, or the elder who explained a medicinal plant grown outside a mud-walled home.

Word of the model has spread mostly by the oldest form of marketing there is: travelers returning home and talking. One American visitor, describing a chaotic trip beset by missed flights and a broken phone, recalled that Atuheire and his co-founder kept the group calm throughout, and noted that the company’s profits flow directly into educating rural children at the school the two men built themselves. It is, of course, in Amatsiko’s interest that such testimonials circulate. But the school’s four hundred and twenty students, its dormitories, its teachers drawing salaries — these are not marketing copy. They are the compounding interest on a bet placed by two boys who once had nothing to invest but their own persistence.

There is a version of Atuheire’s biography that ends at hardship, the kind of story that gets told about a place rather than by the people who live there — Uganda as backdrop for a Western traveler’s awakening. Atuheire’s version insists otherwise. “My school career is full of miracles and wonders,” he has said of his own path, adding that he carries a particular passion for children who grew up as he did — one that sits alongside a wish to protect his land’s beauty and the knowledge held by its elders. It is a modest enough sentence for a life spent proving that a childhood of scarcity, met with sufficient stubbornness, can be rebuilt into an engine of abundance for others. The lake is still there, and the hills still fold into one another. What has changed is who gets to walk them, and why.

For travelers considering Uganda: engagement can take many forms — a homestay along Lake Bunyonyi, a volunteer placement at Amatsiko Preparatory School, an afternoon with a women’s weaving cooperative, or simply the choice of an operator whose profits are visibly, traceably reinvested in the community it moves through. The measure of a meaningful trip, Atuheire’s own life suggests, is not the itinerary but what — and whom — it leaves standing after you’ve gone home.

1793 — Jean-Pierre Blanchard makes the first hot air balloon flight in America, witnessed by George Washington, sparking early American fascination with flight.

1861–1865 — The Union Army uses hot air balloons for reconnaissance during the Civil War, marking the first military use of aircraft in America.

1903 — The Wright Brothers achieve the first powered, controlled, sustained airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

1908 — The Wright Brothers demonstrate their aircraft to the U.S. Army, leading to the first military aircraft contract.

1911 — Calbraith Perry Rodgers completes the first transcontinental flight across the U.S., though it took 49 days with many stops and crashes.

1914 — The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line launches the first scheduled commercial airline flight in the world.

1918 — The U.S. Post Office begins regular airmail service, laying critical groundwork for commercial aviation infrastructure.

1920s — Airmail routes expand nationwide, and early beacons and lighted airways are built to guide night flying.

1926 — The Air Commerce Act establishes federal regulation of civil aviation, improving safety standards.

1927 — Charles Lindbergh completes the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, capturing global attention and boosting public trust in flying.

1930 — Ellen Church becomes the first flight attendant, and United Airlines pioneers in-flight passenger service.

1933 — The Boeing 247 debuts as one of the first modern all-metal commercial airliners.

1935 — The Douglas DC-3 enters service, becoming the first aircraft to make passenger air travel profitable without mail subsidies.

1935 — Pan Am’s “China Clipper” launches the first scheduled transpacific passenger and mail service.

1938 — The Civil Aeronautics Act creates a regulatory framework that standardizes safety and route licensing.

1947 — Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, proving supersonic flight is achievable.

1952–1958 — Jet engine development accelerates, culminating in the Boeing 707.

1958 — The Boeing 707 enters commercial service, officially launching the jet age and cutting transatlantic flight times dramatically.

1958 — The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is established to oversee air traffic safety amid growing jet traffic.

1970 — The Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jet” debuts, more than doubling passenger capacity and making international travel more affordable.

1978 — The Airline Deregulation Act removes government control over fares and routes, spurring competition and lower prices.

1988 — Boeing introduces fly-by-wire technology improvements and digital cockpit systems, enhancing safety and precision.

1995–2000s — GPS-based navigation systems become standard, improving route efficiency and safety across U.S. airspace.

2011 — The Boeing 787 Dreamliner enters service, using lightweight composite materials to cut fuel consumption significantly.

2022 - Pay Me In Plane Tickets Founded 😂

2025 — Several companies (SpaceX, Blue Origin) push into commercial space travel and suborbital flight, while NASA and private firms explore supersonic passenger jets and electric/hybrid aircraft for the future.

There is a particular kind of fury that builds slowly, over years of small reimbursement checks, and then detonates all at once when somebody finally shows you the math. That is roughly what happened to dozens of Marriott International’s largest hotel owners this spring, when the company let slip, almost in passing, on a February earnings call, that revenue from its co-branded credit cards was on pace to climb about 35 percent this year, pushing toward $1 billion. For a long time, owners had been told that the Bonvoy loyalty program, the 30-brand-wide universe of points, status tiers, and free-night redemptions that Marriott has spent a decade building into the connective tissue of its business, more or less broke even. It was a cost center dressed up as a courtesy: a thing hotels paid into because it kept guests coming back, not because anyone made money from it. Then the owners did the arithmetic themselves, and the number didn’t look like a wash. It looked like a windfall, and not theirs.

In March, fifty-one ownership groups, representing nearly a thousand Marriott-branded hotels across the country, sent a letter to Chief Executive Anthony Capuano and Chairman David Marriott. The language was civil, in the way that letters from lawyers tend to be civil, but the complaint underneath it was not subtle. Hotel owners are absorbing an increasing share of the program’s costs while Marriott captures an increasing share of its revenue, the group wrote. Translated out of letterhead diplomacy: we own the buildings, we clean the rooms, we eat the cost every time a guest redeems points for a free night, and you, the corporation that owns none of that real estate, keep the fee.

It helps to understand what Bonvoy actually is, because it is easy to mistake it for a perk and miss that it is, functionally, a distribution and financial-services machine. Marriott itself owns and operates almost none of the roughly 9,400 hotels that carry its flags; the company’s whole modern identity is “asset-light,” meaning it collects franchise royalties and management fees while owners shoulder the capital risk of the real estate. Bonvoy sits on top of that arrangement as the loyalty layer, and increasingly, as the place where the real money lives. Marriott’s IP royalty fees hit $716 million in 2025, up from $410 million in 2019 — a jump of nearly 75 percent in six years, in a business where the marginal cost of issuing another point is close to zero. Card fees are guided to roughly 16 percent of the company’s gross fees this year, up from about 13 percent in 2025, which is the sort of trajectory that gets a stock re-rated on Wall Street as a fee-collecting platform rather than a property company — and Marriott’s shares, trading recently around $400, have largely behaved that way.

The mechanism owners object to is almost elegant in its asymmetry. The card fee is a royalty that Chase and American Express pay Marriott directly — asset-light revenue that costs the brand almost nothing to collect. The expense, meanwhile, lives entirely on the other side of the ledger: every time a member books a free night on points, the owner of that hotel absorbs the room. One program, as a recent industry analysis put it bluntly, but two ledgers — the upside accruing to the flag in Bethesda, the cost sitting with the operator who actually changes the sheets. Owners had quietly tolerated this lopsidedness for years, on the theory that loyalty drove repeat bookings and new customers worth more than the discount. They paid into a fund managed by Marriott that compensated them, at below-market rates, when guests redeemed points for rooms — and one hotelier, writing on the travel forum One Mile at a Time, noted that the base reimbursement at his property runs less than $40 a night, regardless of room type, for a redemption that might otherwise have rented for ten times that on the open market.

What they are asking for now is specific, and notably modest given the size of the number that triggered it. At minimum, owners want compensation for loyalty-program stays to match what they already receive from third-party booking sites such as Expedia — a standard that, if you sit with it, is itself a quietly damning request: hotel owners are asking to be paid by their own franchisor at the same rate an outside online travel agency pays them for occupying the identical room. Beyond that, they want fuller financial disclosure on how the Bonvoy fund actually works, and a piece of the credit-card economics rather than just better terms on the redemption side.

The timing is not incidental. Marriott is renegotiating its credit-card agreements right now, which means the contracts that will lock in this revenue split for years are open at precisely the moment owners chose to apply pressure — a fact unlikely to have escaped either side. Marriott, for its part, has not dismissed the complaint outright. The company says it takes the concerns seriously and has already made gestures toward conciliation: it has cut loyalty charge-out rates in places and raised reimbursements for award stays on high-demand nights, and shared some Bonvoy financial detail with owners for the first time. Whether that amounts to a real concession or a pressure valve depends on what survives the credit-card renegotiation, and that won’t be visible from the outside for some time.

What makes the dispute worth watching is less the dollar figure, real as it is, than what it exposes about the architecture of the modern hotel business. Marriott does not primarily sell rooms anymore; it sells access to nearly 283 million Bonvoy members, a database that banks, airlines, and retailers all want a piece of, and it has built a royalty stream on top of that access that grows almost independent of how many rooms actually get filled. The owners, who still bear all the old risks of hospitality — labor costs, capital expenditure, a leaky roof in Tulsa — are discovering that the part of the business getting richest is the part with no rooms in it at all. The letter from fifty-one owners is, in that sense, less a labor dispute than a referendum on who actually owns the value in a brand once the brand becomes a platform. Marriott built the loyalty program to keep guests faithful to its hotels. It may not have anticipated that the hotels would eventually want to know exactly how faithful the program had become to its parent company instead.

Listen to Rodrigo Baena on Pay Me In Plane Tickets Radio

Baena is Brazilian, well-traveled in the literal sense — Brazil, England, India, Portugal, the Pacific Northwest — and for a while he made his living as a “happiness coach” in Portland, Oregon, which sounds like the setup to a joke until you realize it’s the most on-the-nose résumé line imaginable for a man who would go on to found something called Long Life Locals. Happiness, it turns out, was never really the separate project. It was the rehearsal.

Long Life Locals began, as Baena tells it, from a kind of secondhand grief. He kept noticing travelers — good, curious, well-meaning travelers — arriving in extraordinary places and leaving with nothing but the place’s surface: the skyline, the sunset, the plate of food photographed before it was tasted. In a world where travel has become synonymous with snapshots and social media status updates, Long Life Locals emerged from a collective worry and sadness — the sense that a generation of tourists had perfected the art of visiting somewhere without ever quite arriving.

The project’s founding sentence, the one that does the most work, is this: we don’t travel to places; we travel to people’s homes. It’s a small relocation of emphasis, but it changes the whole itinerary. A place is something you can consume — walk through, photograph, check off. A home asks something different of you. You take your shoes off, metaphorically if not literally. You meet the people who keep the lights on.

This is, on paper, an argument against the dominant economic logic of modern tourism, which Baena has also made more bluntly: that the industry’s biggest hotel chains, booking platforms, and tour operators have spent decades optimizing for convenience and scale, generating enormous revenue while quietly displacing the small bakeries, markets, and family businesses that gave a destination its character in the first place. The market down the street, the one where the fishmonger remembers your name and the vendors ask after your week — that economy doesn’t show up in quarterly earnings, but it’s the one Baena thinks is actually worth saving.

What’s notable is how unglamorous his proposed solution is. Long Life Locals doesn’t pitch itself as a luxury “authentic experience” package, the kind of repackaged exoticism that five-star resorts have been selling for decades under a new label. It reads more like dispatches from someone actually doing the thing he’s recommending — a year spent living in Setúbal, Portugal, rather than passing through it; essays that wander into questions of identity and inheritance as easily as into restaurant recommendations; a stated belief that travel, done right, is less a hobby than “the greatest form of love distribution that the world has seen.”

That line risks sentimentality, and Baena seems unbothered by the risk. There’s something almost old-fashioned about his sincerity in an era when most travel content arrives wrapped in irony or aspiration. He is making, in effect, a moral argument disguised as a travel tip: that where your tourist dollar lands is not a neutral logistical choice but a small act of allegiance, and that community empowerment and sustainable development are not buzzwords to bolt onto a brochure but the actual, measurable result of a thousand small decisions — this bakery instead of that chain, this homestay instead of that resort — made correctly, and often.

Whether this adds up to a movement or simply a very persuasive man with a blog and a mailing list is, admittedly, an open question — these things tend to look the same in their early chapters. But Baena’s bet is a sound one, even if it’s modest: that the future of travel won’t be decided by airlines or algorithms, but by whether enough people can be talked into wanting, for once, to know the name of the woman who sold them their coffee.

There is a particular paralysis that overtakes a person who types “things to do in Lisbon” into a search bar on a gray Tuesday in February. The machine returns, in seconds, a ranked and algorithmically confident list: the Alfâma quarter at dawn, a pastry at Pasteis de Belém, a ride on Tram 28. The specificity is dazzling and strangely deadening at once, as though the city has already been pre-visited on your behalf. What you experience, in the end, may be less a discovery than a confirmation.

This is the promise and the predicament of artificial intelligence in travel planning: a competence so thorough it risks replacing the fumbling, serendipitous process by which we have always discovered somewhere new. The adoption curve has been steep and startling.

Among those under thirty-five, the figure climbs to forty percent. A parallel Statista study placed global adoption even higher: roughly forty percent of consumers worldwide reported using an AI-based tool for travel planning as of late 2024, with millennials leading at fifty-seven percent. In the United States, a third of travelers now use generative AI in their travel process, well ahead of the U.K.’s twenty-two percent and Germany’s fifteen. Generating trip itineraries, according to a 2025 global study, ranks as the single most common use of AI-powered features among travelers — ahead of price comparison, review analysis, and language assistance.

And yet there are interesting fissures in the data. A YouGov survey conducted in the summer of 2025 found that comfort with AI in travel planning had actually declined among younger Americans — the demographic presumed to be its most enthusiastic adopters. Among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, comfort levels dropped from forty-seven percent in 2024 to thirty-four percent a year later: a thirteen-point retreat that surprised researchers. The generation that grew up swiping and streaming appears to be developing a reflexive skepticism about ceding yet another life experience to an algorithm. Meanwhile, the thirty-five-to-forty-four cohort quietly became the most AI-positive demographic in the United States — adults old enough to remember planning before the internet, and young enough to embrace its successor.

The philosophical objection to AI trip planning is not, at its heart, about accuracy or efficiency. It is about something more intimate: the productive anxiety of not knowing what you will find. The wrong turn into an unnamed trattoria. The unexpected festival encountered while trying to navigate out of a village. The bookstore discovered it because you got off one stop too early on the Metro. These are not bugs in the travel experience; for many people, they are precisely the point. When a language model generates an itinerary, it draws on the aggregated experience of everyone who has already been somewhere and written about it — producing the consensus trip, the distilled essence of what millions of prior visitors found notable. What it cannot generate is genuine novelty. It can recommend the neighborhood that travel writers began rhapsodizing about eighteen months ago; it cannot recommend the block that no one has noticed yet. The horizon it offers is real, but it is always, in some sense, behind you.

Overtourism

There is also the question of what happens to a place when it is consistently surfaced by the same algorithmic recommendations to millions of users simultaneously. The overtourism crisis that has beset Venice, Barcelona, and Dubrovnik long predates generative AI, but the logic of AI optimization — find the best, surface the best, route everyone toward the best — seems engineered to accelerate it. When every traveler consults the same model for a hidden gem, the gem ceases to be hidden within weeks. The machine, in its eagerness to please, may be quietly cannibalizing the very experiences it promises to deliver.

Travel Advisors

No professional cohort is watching these developments more carefully than the travel advisor industry — a sector that survived the online booking revolution of the early 2000s by retreating upmarket, and now finds itself contemplating a second such upheaval. A 2025 TravelAge West survey found that forty-five percent of travel advisors believe AI-powered tools could eventually threaten their role, up from thirty-eight percent two years prior. A global RateHawk study put the concern at forty-four percent of agents worldwide. And yet advisors are not retreating; they are adapting. In 2023, sixteen percent used AI in their practice. By 2025, fifty-eight percent do. Seventy-three percent plan to increase that use over the next twelve months — a striking reversal from 2023, when more than half said they had no plans to use the technology at all.

What AI genuinely cannot replicate, advisors will tell you, is the architecture of accountability. A chatbot that hallucinates a nonexistent resort does not receive your panicked call from the airport. It does not have a relationship with the general manager who can find you a room when the booking system has failed. It does not know that your clients, despite requesting an “adventurous” itinerary, are actually the kind of people who will be miserable without reliable Wi-Fi and a Western-style shower. A 2024 Forbes Advisor survey found that seventy-one percent of travelers value human support specifically when things go wrong — which is to say, in the moments that matter most. The moat around the travel advisor, it turns out, is not knowledge. It is judgment, relationship, and the willingness to answer the phone.

The algorithm knows you’re going to Rome. It knows the best time to book, the quietest piazza at noon, the restaurant that opened six months ago and has not yet been overrun. What it cannot know is what you will make of all of it — what unplanned moment will become the one you talk about for years. Nearly half of AI users still verify the machine’s recommendations elsewhere; only twenty-two percent trust it with minimal review. The fastest-growing cohort of AI skeptics is also among the youngest, as though the generation most shaped by digital mediation is also the first to sense its costs. Perhaps what we are watching is not a straightforward takeover but a negotiation: between the human desire for efficiency and the equally human desire to be surprised, between the comfort of the known itinerary and the stubborn pull of the uncharted road. That remainder — whatever it amounts to — may be the last truly human part of travel. For now, it appears, we are still fighting to keep it.

Rodway’s thesis is disarmingly simple: the moment you step off a plane, you are a guest. Not a consumer, not a content creator, not an influencer with a ring light and a hotel comp. A guest. And guests, she insists, carry obligations. “We’ve built an entire industry around the idea that the world exists for our discovery,” she said recently. “But discovery, done badly, is just extraction.”

The People You Meet is part travelogue, part cultural reckoning. It traces Rodway’s journeys across six countries — from the medinas of Morocco to the hill towns of northern Vietnam — through the lens not of landscapes, but of encounters. A market vendor in Hanoi who has spent thirty years watching tourists photograph her without asking. A family in rural Portugal who opened their home to a stranger and received a scathing TripAdvisor review in return. A community in Oaxaca quietly dismantling the infrastructure of “authentic” tourism that had reshaped their neighborhood beyond recognition.

Listen to Melissa Rodway on Pay Me In Plane Tickets Radio

What Rodway brings to these stories is neither sentimentality nor polemic, but something rarer: attention. She is a writer who lingers. She asks follow-up questions. She returns. The cumulative effect is a portrait of tourism’s shadow — the gap between the world as it is marketed and the world as it is lived by those who stay.

“Ethical travel is not a checklist,” Rodway is careful to say. “It’s not about buying the right handicrafts or staying in the locally owned guesthouse, though those things matter. It’s about showing up with humility — which is harder than it sounds, because travel is an industry that sells confidence. It sells you the idea that you know how to be somewhere you’ve never been.”

The book arrived at a moment when the conversation around overtourism has shifted from niche concern to mainstream anxiety — Barcelona protests, Venice day-tripper levies, Kyoto guesthouses posting signs in English asking visitors, politely, to behave. Rodway did not set out to write a timely book, but she has ended up with one. She is also refreshingly uninterested in offering easy absolution. The answer, in her telling, is not to travel less, but to travel differently — more slowly, more curiously, and with far greater willingness to be uncomfortable.

For a writer whose subject is the ethics of presence, Rodway is surprisingly pragmatic about her own imperfection. She has, she admits, been the thoughtless tourist. She has taken the photograph she shouldn’t have, eaten at the restaurant she knew was a tourist trap, tipped too little and moved on too fast. The book, in that sense, is as much confession as critique. “I wrote it because I needed to think these things through,” she says. “I’m not offering a verdict. I’m asking the same questions I think every traveler ought to be asking — and probably isn’t.”

The people she met along the way, it turns out, had a great deal to say. The book’s great gift is that Rodway had the patience — and the conscience — to listen.

The partnership announced that morning was not, in the clinical language of press releases, a “traditional influencer endorsement.” It was billed as a multi-phase, global campaign, anchored by a bespoke website—Exspeedia.com—where fans can track IShowSpeed’s travels, vote on his next destinations, and book flights and hotels that mirror his itinerary. The portmanteau alone tells you something: Expedia did not merely hire a creator. It merged its brand identity with his. That is a different kind of deal.

To understand why Expedia made this bet, it helps to understand what IShowSpeed actually is. He is not a travel influencer in any recognizable sense. He does not curate sunrise shots over Santorini or produce hushed, beige-toned hotel room reviews. He is, by temperament and design, a chaos agent—loud, emotional, frequently wrong, and compulsively watchable. His Africa tour generated 16 million hours watched across roughly 118 hours of streaming. His Europe leg drew a peak of more than 500,000 concurrent viewers. The Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania quietly paid him to visit during his 2025 European swing, understanding that a Speed appearance functions less like advertising and more like a weather event.

The hospitality and travel sector has been circling this moment for years, nudged forward by data it could not ignore. A meaningful portion of Gen Z now reports that social media—specifically YouTube and TikTok—is their primary tool for trip planning, displacing both search engines and the glossy editorial ecosystem that once made careers for a generation of travel writers. Creator advertising spend reached $37 billion in 2025 and is tracking toward $44 billion this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which now classifies it as a "core media channel" rather than a supplementary line item. The old model—magazine spread, TV spot, celebrity endorsement—has not died, but it has become expensive relative to its reach among anyone under thirty.

The hospitality and travel sector has been circling this moment for years, nudged forward by data it could not ignore. A meaningful portion of Gen Z now reports that social media—specifically YouTube and TikTok—is their primary tool for trip planning, displacing both search engines and the glossy editorial ecosystem that once made careers for a generation of travel writers. Creator advertising spend reached $37 billion in 2025 and is tracking toward $44 billion this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which now classifies it as a “core media channel” rather than a supplementary line item. The old model—magazine spread, TV spot, celebrity endorsement—has not died, but it has become expensive relative to its reach among anyone under thirty.

What makes the Expedia-Speed arrangement structurally distinct, and something of a Rorschach test for the industry, is its architecture. Expedia reportedly spent more than six months planning the Caribbean launch. The company brought in consultants from the gaming and streaming sectors. It gave Watkins Jr. creative input on everything from the teaser trailer to the look of Exspeedia.com. Crucially, Lauri Metrose, Expedia’s senior VP of global communications, told reporters: “We didn’t put any restrictions saying, ‘Don’t say this. You can’t do this. You can’t do that.’” In a media landscape still traumatized by years of stilted, hashtag-laden influencer content, this reads almost as an act of bravery. The livestream format enforces it—there is no editing, no brand-safety net, no second take when the pelican is screaming back.

The traditional travel-influencer model operated on something like a franchise arrangement: a creator with a curated aesthetic would produce sponsored content for a hotel group or tourism board, the content would live on Instagram or a blog, and its influence was measured in impressions and engagement rates that, as every honest CMO will admit, were always slightly suspect. The relationship between content and booking was real but indirect, long-tailed, and difficult to attribute. What Expedia is attempting is a compression of that journey—from inspiration to transaction—using the particular superpower of a livestream: the live audience is, by definition, already engaged, already present, and already operating in a mode of spontaneous decision-making. A six-second teaser for the partnership accumulated more than 12 million views on YouTube before the campaign even officially launched.

The question that nobody in the industry will answer on the record is whether any of this drives bookings at a scale that justifies what is almost certainly a nine-figure investment over the year-long partnership. Metrose called it one of Expedia’s “big bets.” CEO Ariane Gorin, during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call, framed the broader creative strategy as making spend “more effective”—a formulation that covers a great deal of uncertainty. Financial analysts at Simply Wall Street noted the partnership directly targets Gen Z at a moment of structural shift, while flagging that elevated customer acquisition costs remain a risk regardless of how the campaign performs.

That tension—between the mythological scale of IShowSpeed’s reach and the prosaic reality of cost-per-acquisition—is where this story lives. Expedia is not merely buying eyeballs. It is testing whether a single creator, given enough latitude and institutional support, can function as an always-on travel brand unto himself: a destination guide, a booking engine, and a media property simultaneously. If it works, the implications for how hotels, airlines, and OTAs think about marketing are considerable. If it doesn’t, it will become a very expensive case study that future marketing departments cite while justifying more cautious choices.

For now, IShowSpeed is somewhere in the Caribbean—or heading to North American cities, per Expedia’s roadmap—probably yelling at something. The camera is on. The stream is live. And 500,000 people are watching, several of whom, somewhere in the back of their minds, are thinking about where they want to go next.

There is a passage of water, twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point, between the Omani coast and the Iranian shore, through which, until recently, roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil quietly flowed each day. The Strait of Hormuz is not, as a piece of geography, especially dramatic. It is not the Grand Canyon. It does not inspire postcards. But when Iran effectively closed it earlier this year in response to U.S. and Israeli military action, it managed, in a matter of weeks, to accomplish something that no number of airline mergers, no fleet of consultants, no pandemic-era revenue-management algorithm had quite pulled off: it made the dream of affordable air travel feel, briefly, historical.

Jet fuel prices have risen more than eighty percent since the war on Iran began in late February, and the arithmetic from there is not especially forgiving. In the United States, jet fuel hit a record $4.62 a gallon — a number that would look modest on a Manhattan cocktail menu but is, for an industry that burns millions of gallons a day, the difference between a quarterly earnings call that goes smoothly and one that does not. Domestic airfare is up eighteen percent, according to Going.com, while international airfare has risen seven and a half percent — figures that, stated plainly, obscure the more vivid reality of the gate-agent encounter, the involuntary reroute, the itinerary that evaporates.

The effects have a certain grim democratizing quality. U.S. domestic flight prices were up twenty-one percent year-on-year in March, and AirAsia’s chief executive likened the fallout to the widespread shutdowns of the pandemic. Alaska Airlines, which runs a hub out of Seattle-Tacoma, said rising fuel prices were likely to add an extra $600 million in expenses between April and June, and responded by increasing ticket prices, raising checked-bag fees, and cutting routes. Spirit Airlines, the carrier that once seemed to exist specifically to remind passengers that air travel could always be made slightly less pleasant for slightly less money, announced it would permanently cease operations, a move widely attributed to soaring fuel costs.

The supply problem is not merely financial; it is, in places, physical. South Korea asked its government to help redirect fuel stocks bound for export back to local markets. The United Kingdom faced an acute shortage, with no Britain-bound cargoes visible on the water as transit through the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked. The disruption has already cut off nearly one-fifth of global seaborne jet fuel supply, sending shockwaves through airlines, airports, and tourism-dependent economies across Asia, Europe, and Africa.

Airlines, for their part, have responded with the full repertoire of cost-passing instruments available to a lightly regulated oligopoly under stress: fuel surcharges appended to tickets like footnotes no one reads, bag fees adjusted upward with the confident asymmetry of a ratchet, and route cuts administered with a surgeon’s precision to the flights that had kept mid-week travel bearable. Across a wide-ranging list of markets, airlines have cut 9.3 million seats for the period of June 1 through September 30, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. KLM alone, that stalwart of Dutch efficiency, announced 160 flight cancellations in May. United will drop about five percent of planned flights in mostly off-peak periods — red-eyes, midweek routes — during the second and third quarters of 2026.

What is perhaps most clarifying about the Hormuz crisis, as a chapter in the long, strange biography of mass air travel, is what it has revealed about the assumptions built into the system. Most U.S. carriers no longer hedge fuel costs, leaving them with no choice but to pass the increases directly to passengers. The era of the hundred-dollar transatlantic fare, born of a particular geopolitical stability and a particular willingness to price labor and fuel at their lowest conceivable point, turns out to have been contingent — contingent on a waterway staying open, on a region staying calm, on a set of supply chains so optimized that any friction reveals them to have been, all along, a kind of miracle of forgetting.

There is a ceasefire. There are analysts. There is, from the travel industry, the standard suite of cautiously worded outlooks. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen tomorrow, analysts warn, the deep structural damage to energy infrastructure and supplies from the Gulf will impact the global airline sector for many months, probably longer.

The summer, in any case, will be expensive. Pack light.

There is a specific, quiet desperation that settles in the cabin of a long-haul flight just as the sun begins to bleed over the Atlantic. It is the moment when the cabin lights flicker to a simulated dawn, and the passengers—drawn from the four corners of their own anxieties—awaken to the realization that they have successfully transported their physical bodies across an ocean, yet their minds remain stubbornly tethered to the very things they sought to escape.

Travel has long been marketed as the ultimate panacea, a spiritual rinse for the grime of modern existence. Neurological studies suggest that new environments trigger neuroplasticity; the brain, forced to navigate the unfamiliar, creates new pathways. But as the ‘experience economy’ has evolved into a global imperative, the psychological toll of the journey has begun to outweigh the destination.

The ‘Post-Travel Blues’ are not merely a nostalgic hangover. They are a neurochemical crash. We manufacture a year’s worth of dopamine in a ten-day stint, only to return to a grey cubicle where the contrast creates a profound sense of mourning. Travel does not always heal; sometimes, it merely highlights the cracks in the foundation of our daily lives.

Perhaps the most insidious evolution in our wanderlust is the financial wreckage left in its wake. In an era of ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ (BNPL) and high-interest credit cards, the barrier to entry for the ‘luxury’ experience has vanished, replaced by a looming debt shadow. We are witnessing a rise in ‘Social Debt’—the act of borrowing against one’s future security to fund a present-day performance of success.

This financial recklessness is fueled by the digital panopticon of social media. We no longer travel to see; we travel to be seen. The pressure to curate an aesthetic of effortless leisure has turned the traveler into a content producer, and the destination into a back-lot set. It is a pantomime of the elite life, performed by the middle class, funded by the banks.

When we view travel through the lens of comparison, we engage in a zero-sum game. To see a peer’s curated highlight reel is to feel a phantom limb pain for a life we aren’t living. But comparison is the thief of presence. If you are standing in front of a monument thinking about how your photo will look compared to a stranger’s, you are not truly there; you are in a digital purgatory.

The antidote is not to stop moving, but to change the direction of our gaze. We must reclaim travel as an act of internal exploration rather than external validation. Travel for the self is quiet. It is often un-photogenic. It involves the discomfort of being alone with one’s thoughts.

We must remind ourselves: never compare your ‘inside’ to someone else’s ‘outside.’ Their sunset is not a commentary on your sunrise. In the end, the only miles that matter are the ones that lead you back to a version of yourself that doesn’t feel the need to run away quite so often.

Listen to Rachel Hartigan on Pay Me In Plane Tickets Radio

Her new book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, published this spring, is a dual-threaded narrative: one strand follows Earhart’s life from her itinerant, unsettled childhood in Atchison, Kansas, through her ascent as the most famous aviator in the world; the other pulls the reader into the present-day vortex of investigators, obsessives, and forensic scientists attempting to determine where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ended up when their Lockheed Electra vanished over the central Pacific on July 2, 1937. The result is something richer and stranger than a biography or a mystery: it is an inquiry into the nature of myth itself, into what happens when a real woman is conscripted into the service of a nation’s self-image, and into what it costs — in time, in money, in sanity — to try to pull her back out.

The three theories Hartigan examines have each attracted their own faithful. The first holds that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed near the Marshall Islands, were captured by Japanese forces who suspected the aviatrix of being an American spy, and died in captivity. The second, championed by a group called TIGHAR, maintains that the plane made an emergency landing on the remote atoll of Nikumaroro, in what is now Kiribati, and that the pair died there of thirst, starvation, or injury before anyone came looking. The third is the one most aviation experts consider most probable: the fuel simply ran out, the plane went into the ocean, and Earhart and Noonan died quickly and without drama, their wreckage settling to a sea too deep and vast to be meaningfully searched. This is the death with no story to tell, which is perhaps why it has attracted the fewest devoted adherents.

Hartigan is at her best when describing the world of the searchers — a world that exists somewhere between rigorous scientific inquiry and something resembling a calling. She joins an expedition to Nikumaroro, where forensic dogs are deployed to search for biological traces that might, if the stars align and the science cooperates, yield a sample of Earhart’s DNA. The image of cadaver dogs nosing through Pacific undergrowth in search of an eighty-nine-year-old scent is one of the book’s most indelible. What she finds is tantalizing but inconclusive — bone fragments that may or may not be human, artifacts that could support the castaway hypothesis or could mean almost anything else. This is the epistemological trap the Earhart mystery sets for anyone who approaches it in good faith: the absence of conclusive evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, and those devoted to the search have learned to live very comfortably in that gap.

The life threaded through all of this searching is extraordinary enough to justify a book without any mystery attached. Earhart was born in 1897 to a family undone by her father’s alcoholism, her childhood marked by instability and the humiliation of genteel poverty. She discovered aviation almost accidentally at a county fair in 1920, and the experience was transformative: she knew, looking down from an open-cockpit biplane, that she would spend her life in the air. What Hartigan excavates with particular care is the role played by George Putnam — the publisher who became her husband in 1931 — in constructing the Earhart the world came to know. Putnam understood that her value was not merely aeronautical but symbolic, and he was skilled at knowing which elements of her story to amplify and which to quietly set aside. The result was a figure both more and less than the real woman: more heroic, more serene; less complicated, less frightened, less aware of the gap between what she projected and what she felt.

The world flight attempt that ended in the Pacific in July of 1937 was Earhart’s second try at an equatorial circumnavigation. The last confirmed radio contact placed the plane somewhere over the central Pacific, running low on fuel, unable to locate the tiny island of Howland where a Coast Guard cutter was waiting. The transmissions grew more anxious, then stopped. The search that followed was the largest in United States naval history at that point, and it found nothing. Hartigan does not pretend to know what happened in those final hours — what she does instead is map the topology of not-knowing, the strange geography that opens up when a question refuses to close, and ask what it tells us about America’s need for its heroines to be simultaneously triumphant and unfinished.

The book has been praised by writers whose enthusiasm tends to be reliable — Susan Orlean called it “beautifully reported and gracefully written,” and Hampton Sides described it as revealing Earhart as a powerful figure of fable and myth who still ignites a sense of wonder. Hartigan writes with clarity and control, and she has done the kind of reporting — traveling to remote islands, sitting with obsessives, reading correspondence and flight logs and forensic reports — that makes the book feel genuinely earned. If there is a reservation, it is that the alternating structure can occasionally feel like two excellent magazine articles stapled together in a binding slightly too small for both. But Lost takes a subject that has been done many times and finds in it something genuinely new to say.

Amelia Earhart disappeared at forty years old, in the middle of an adventure she had chosen freely. The tragedy, Hartigan suggests, is partly retrospective — something we project onto her story from the other side of the silence. We need her to have suffered, to have been wronged, to have been on the verge of something cruelly taken from her, because that is the story shape that makes the loss feel meaningful rather than arbitrary. The searchers on Nikumaroro, with their forensic dogs and carefully mapped grids, are doing something that looks like science but is also, underneath, something older: they are trying to recover a body so that it can be properly mourned. Rachel Hartigan knows this, and she has written a book that is honest about it. In the end, Lost is less about what happened to Amelia Earhart than about what it means to care, this deeply and this persistently, about a woman who vanished into the Pacific almost ninety years ago. That is, it turns out, quite a lot to care about.

Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life

Rachel Hartigan