The record tells a different story. Construction on The Line has been suspended since September 2025. In May, the news outlet Semafor reported that work would not resume until at least after 2030. On Oct. 4, Reuters reported that a 46,000-seat World Cup stadium designed to hang 1,150 feet above the desert inside the structure had been shelved indefinitely. NEOM did not reply to requests for comment.

What remains, after an estimated $50 billion or more spent across NEOM, is roughly 1.5 miles of foundations, a single resort island and an unresolved question: who knew the plan was unworkable, and when?

The engineering warnings were there from the start. The Line called for a continuous glass-walled structure about 1,640 feet tall and 650 feet wide, running 106 miles from the Red Sea across valleys and mountain ranges, eventually home to nine million people with no cars and no streets. Urban planners noted that a city with almost no width would need dozens of stations to honor its promise of a five-minute walk to everything, and that a sealed wall of that length would have to withstand seismic risk, sandstorms and the expansion of steel in desert heat.

Rather than resolve those problems, NEOM poured concrete. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that foundations were laid before architects had finished designing what would stand on them, in part so the crown prince could see progress. When the site shifted, those foundations were abandoned. Excavated earth was dumped where a waterway was planned, and a compound housing NEOM’s own engineers turned out to sit in the structure’s revised path. Thousands of deep piles went into the desert floor. The structural steel never followed, and the mirrored façade has never left the renderings.

The finances were worse and, by NEOM’s own internal accounting, knowingly so. The publicly stated budget for all of NEOM was $500 billion. In March 2025, The Journal reported on an internal audit that put the cost of building the development to its full “end state” by 2080 at $8.8 trillion, more than 25 times Saudi Arabia’s annual budget. The auditors found evidence of deliberate manipulation by managers: revenue projections, including expected hotel room rates, had been raised to make spiraling costs look justified. Staff proposals to save money, such as lowering The Line’s height, were reportedly rejected by the crown prince. McKinsey, NEOM’s principal strategy consultant, helped build the financial models and validate them, a dual role The Journal said raised potential conflicts of interest.

For the hospitality industry, that detail should land hardest. Hotel operators signed agreements for a destination whose business case, according to its own auditors, rested on room rates inflated to keep the project alive.

The unwinding has been quiet but relentless. Nadhmi al-Nasr, NEOM’s chief executive since 2018, left abruptly in November 2024 with no reason given. His successor, Aiman al-Mudaifer, ordered a strategic review. In January, The Financial Times reported that The Line would be recast as a far smaller project built around industry and data centers for artificial intelligence. In March, NEOM terminated more than $5 billion in contracts on The Line and Trojena, its mountain resort, including a $4.7 billion dam being built by the Italian contractor Webuild. Semafor reported that NEOM now aims for up to 100,000 residents by 2030, a fraction of the 1.5 million once envisioned, and is shifting about $3 billion to Oxagon, its port and industrial zone. No official statement has ever announced a reduction in scope.

The human costs were visible early, too. The land NEOM occupies was home for generations to the Huwaitat tribe. In 2020, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, who had posted videos objecting to the evictions, was killed by Saudi security forces. In 2022, the rights group ALQST reported that three tribesmen who resisted displacement had been sentenced to death. Saudi Arabia told the United Nations the men were terrorists, denied that any forced evictions occurred and said more than 6,000 people had been relocated. In 2024, the BBC reported that Saudi forces had been authorized to use lethal force to clear villages in The Line’s path.

Then there is the labor. A 2024 ITV documentary, “Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia,” reported that some 21,000 workers from India, Bangladesh and Nepal had died in the kingdom since the Vision 2030 program began. The figure covers the whole country, not NEOM alone, but workers on The Line told the filmmakers of 16-hour days, denied leave and little time to sleep. Saudi safety officials rejected the findings, citing a fatality rate of 1.12 per 100,000 workers, and NEOM said its contractors must follow a code of conduct based on International Labour Organization standards. Several architecture firms walked away from NEOM over rights concerns; others among the industry’s biggest names did not respond when asked about the documentary.

The hotel brands, meanwhile, are left holding announcements. Marriott, Four Seasons, Ennismore, Minor Hotels and Hyatt all unveiled NEOM projects during the boom years. Today the only operating hotel sits on Sindalah, a Red Sea yachting island that opened in October 2024 with an 86-berth marina and Oraya, a Marriott Autograph Collection property. Four Seasons now lists its Sindalah resort for 2028. Trojena, marketed as a year-round ski destination, lost the 2029 Asian Winter Games, which Saudi organizers postponed in January; the Games have since been linked to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Semafor reported that NEOM’s other Red Sea resorts will not be developed before 2030.

For travelers, the practical answer is simple. The Line is a closed construction site, with no visitor center and no tours; the kingdom’s more established resort developments lie farther south on the Red Sea coast and inland at AlUla.

The harder questions belong to the industry. Which companies tested NEOM’s revenue assumptions before signing? What diligence was done on how the land was cleared, or on the conditions of the people pouring the foundations? And what does it mean that the most ambitious hospitality pipeline in the Middle East was, by its own auditors’ account, propped up by room rates that did not exist?

In the desert north of the Gulf of Aqaba, the piles remain in the ground, waiting for a city that may never come.

Good morning. Despite Margin Call’s Tuesday release, I hope you all enjoyed a restful Indigenous Peoples Day!

Be First —

I’ll admit my first instinct with any consumer boycott is to bet against it. Outrage is cheap, a holiday is expensive, and a discount usually settles the argument. That’s why I found Justin Trudeau’s remarks at the World Travel & Tourism Council’s Global Summit in Malta last Friday more interesting than the usual conference fare. The former Canadian prime minister argued that disrespect and a lack of welcome, not price or scenery, are what is keeping Canadians away from the U.S. WTTC chief Gloria Guevara put a number on it: Canadian visits to the U.S. are down 22%.

For those of us who watch revenue rather than politics, the striking part is Trudeau’s account of what happened next. Canada never imposed penalties or raised prices, he said. Canadians simply “stayed home”, and when U.S. airlines, hotels and tour operators cut prices to win them back, they still didn’t come. In plain terms, demand that should have responded to price didn’t. That is an unusually expensive lesson in how much a destination’s brand is worth, and it is one Florida, Arizona and Maine are learning the hard way as they court Canadians to return.

Trudeau’s wider point is one I would underline for anyone in this industry: governments take tourism for granted in a way they never would with a manufacturing or natural-resources strategy, even though it is an export business like any other. The other side, it should be said, is making its own case. Trump’s tourism envoy used the same summit to criticise travel boycotts. But the numbers matter more than the speeches here. If cheaper rooms can’t bring back a market that close and that loyal, the gap is not a pricing problem, and the industry shouldn’t expect a pricing fix to solve it.

Be Smarter —

The windy city is on strike.

Chicago hotel strike is not the picket lines but where the money sits. Two days before the Chicago Marathon, hundreds of Unite Here Local 1 members walked out of six downtown hotels: three Marriott-branded, two Hilton-branded and the Millennium Knickerbocker. On paper, the threat is much larger. More than 7,000 workers at 46 hotels authorized a strike, contracts expired at 44 of them on August 31, and local union president Karen Kent says the rest could walk out at any moment. The union’s argument is that there is “enough money in this system,” and it points to the $22.3B it estimates Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt returned to shareholders over three years. That is where I would push back a little, as an accounting point rather than a political one. Those buybacks are funded by the brands’ fee income, while the wage bill falls on the owners and operators, and their economics look far less comfortable. Labour was just over half of U.S. hotel operating expenses in 2023, according to CBRE, and U.S. hotel earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization fell 2.4% in 2024 and 4.3% in 2025.

In other words, the companies with the cash are not the ones paying the payroll. The sticking point is also not mainly wages. Hence, why I track free cash flow ‘cause some say it’s smart, and ‘cause “show me the money!”.

It seems the hotels says talks have stalled on a clause that would automatically extend union representation to a company’s other hotels in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa, with economic terms barely discussed. That makes this a fight about how far the union’s reach extends, not a single pay round. For investors, it means any settlement in Chicago could set terms for hotels well beyond the city.

Or Cheat —

Every autumn the booking platforms publish their trend forecasts for the year ahead, and every autumn I read them the way I read a sell-side note from the bank underwriting the deal: with interest, and with a firm grip on my wallet. Skyscanner’s 2027 list, reported by TravelPulse, offers seven trends and no sample size, so treat the percentages as vibes with decimal points. Some are more branding exercise than market shift: “Sound Bound” jazz-club pilgrimages, joint bachelor-bachelorette “Together Trips,” and “Merch Tourism,” in which 23% of travellers say a hotel-branded robe is the souvenir they’re proudest of, which suggests the hotel gift shop has quietly become the best-performing asset on the property. The trend worth a hedge-fund analyst’s attention is “Currency Chasers.” Skyscanner says 41% of Americans have switched destinations because of the exchange rate, including 72% of Gen Z, which means the youngest travelers now watch FX markets more closely than some treasurers. “Gym-cations” fits the wellness story, too: 66% say a nutritious breakfast makes them likelier to book, a cheaper fix than redesigning rooms around sleep, and frankly the only capex plan in this industry that involves chia pudding. The list closes with “Signal Severance,” travelers going off-grid to disconnect, a bold forecast for a company that earns its living when people open an app. My takeaway: watch the currency data, and take these cheat hashtags with the overnight oats.

Again, happy post Indigenous Peoples Day! ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

For generations, the families of Zvërnec have grazed cattle and tended olive groves on a thin finger of land between the Narta Lagoon and the Adriatic, where flamingos gather each summer. This year, a concrete fence topped with barbed wire went up around much of it, cutting villagers off from their fields and from the sea.

The fence marks the site of a luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the son-in-law and daughter of President Trump. It is the mainland half of a two-part venture that also includes Sazan, Albania’s largest island, where a company tied to Mr. Kushner plans a resort valued at roughly €1.4 billion, or about $1.4 billion.

A fast track timed to power. The path was cleared with remarkable speed. In early 2024, Albania’s Parliament loosened its protected-areas law in a way that opened the door to five-star development; within weeks, Mr. Kushner unveiled sketches for Sazan and Zvërnec on social media. On Dec. 30, 2024 — three weeks before his father-in-law’s second inauguration — a committee led by Prime Minister Edi Rama granted “strategic investor” status to Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC for the Sazan project. Months later, days after the couple visited Vlorë, the government created a state company to take a stake in it.

Mr. Kushner built his investment firm, Affinity Partners, after leaving the White House, with $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. He has insisted that nobody is handing him deals. But in a region where leaders openly compete for the president’s favor, the overlap between family business and American power is difficult to ignore. Mr. Rama, for his part, has said Albania needs luxury tourism “like a desert needs water.”

The ownership structure has grown harder to trace as scrutiny has grown. Questions are now routed to Sazan Real Estate Development, a Qatar-based entity led by Asher Abehsera, a longtime Kushner business partner, whose spokesman has said Mr. Kushner is investing in a personal capacity rather than through Affinity. A separate offshore company, Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, has signed agreements with people claiming ownership of some 650 acres (251 hectares) in Zvërnec and Narta, according to the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

Villagers say much of that land was never the seller’s to sell. Their claim dates to the 1990s, when Albania returned farmland to residents after communism; they have shown reporters deeds and tax records from that era. Since 2006 they have fought Artur Shehu, a Vlorë-born businessman living in Florida, who claims the same pastures and coast. An Albanian court ruled for the villagers in 2013, but Mr. Shehu appealed, and the case has never been resolved. He then agreed to sell land to a development company anyway. The day after one such deal, Ms. Trump praised the site’s white-sand beaches on a podcast.

“No one mentions that people live here,” said Kostaq Konomi, the village head, who learned from the news that his land had become a resort. The families’ lawyer has said they would seek a court order to halt construction. Many residents belong to the area’s Greek-speaking minority and fear losing ancestral land outright.

Prosecutors are now examining the property’s ownership history and allege that Mr. Shehu and associates were involved in money laundering and drug trafficking, which he denies. About €105 million that a Kushner-backed group paid for the land has been frozen in a notary account. Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutor has also opened an inquiry into the 2024 changes to the area’s protected status. No wrongdoing has been alleged against Mr. Kushner or Ms. Trump, and Reuters found no evidence he was directly involved in the land dispute.

The fence set off what Albanians call the “Flamingo Revolution”: by mid-July, protesters had marched in Tirana for 42 consecutive nights, demanding the project’s cancellation and Mr. Rama’s resignation. The European Union warned that the development could jeopardize Albania’s accession benchmarks. Conservationists note that the Vjosa-Narta lagoon shelters more than 250 bird species, along with seals and nesting sea turtles.

Mr. Rama says the state owns no land at Zvërnec and that his government is not involved there. That is precisely the villagers’ complaint: a project bearing the most powerful family name on earth advanced through a fog of private claims, offshore companies and personal-capacity investments — while the people who have farmed the land for centuries were the last to know. Mr. Kushner did not respond to requests for comment through Affinity Partners.

Good morning. Warm welcome to quarter four of 2026, the last stretch for the year!

Be First —

Every so often I find it that an industry decides that a cost center is really a strategy, and the hotel trade's current candidate is wellness. Wellness tourism was an $894B market in 2024 and is heading toward $1T before the end of the decade. Luxury hotels should stop treating wellness as a spa-menu upsell and make it the product itself. Evidence is mainly about how expectations have shifted. Guests now assume features like circadian lighting, clean air and water, and rooms designed for sleep, in the same way they assume fast Wi-Fi. A brand still marketing a green juice menu, simply looks dated.

The more interesting point for investors is about where money is flowing. Citing Kearney, Moura says “affluent consumers with spare cash choose travel ahead of jewellery and watches, and that hotels and fine dining are growing at roughly 8% through 2028”. On that view, hospitality is not just a beneficiary of luxury spending but is replacing parts of the health, fitness and self-care industries. Essentially putting wellness first before previous leading dynamics.

I took a glance at the Hilton's Signia Restore recovery concept, launching in Indianapolis in January 2027, is the kind of bet he has in mind. Investors should be cautious about one part of this argument. Once a feature becomes a baseline expectation, it usually stops earning a premium and starts consuming capital. In short, redesigning a building around sleep is far more expensive than adding a juice bar, and an expectation that guests take for granted is one they rarely pay extra for.

The winners will be properties with a distinctive cultural or architectural identity that competitors cannot easily copy. That may well be right, but it is a difficult strategy for a large chain to execute across hundreds of hotels.

Be Smarter —

I find it interesting, and somewhat smart when a company opens an interview by admitting that "our lines have been a little bit blurry", the right response is a skeptical "Go on, then."

Kayak for Business, the corporate arm of the Booking Holdings-owned metasearch brand, exhibited at the Global Business Travel Association convention for the first time in August. Its pitch was that it is no longer just the enterprise booking tool tied to a single travel management company, Blockskye. It now serves both small and midsize firms and large enterprises, and it has gone global by adding partners such as FCM and Altour.

Senior vice president Eva Fouquet describes the product as a content aggregator. It pulls in airline content through Amadeus but makes its money on the edge it claims in direct supplier connections for hotels, rail and ground transport. Travel management companies then add their own service layer on top, and in the paid small-business tier Kayak provides that service itself. That is a polite way of saying Kayak sells to the agencies while also competing with them, a balance that tends to hold only until one side's margins come under pressure. On AI, Fouquet is notably restrained. Kayak will run natural-language booking alongside traditional search instead of rushing to a one-prompt checkout, because, she says, users are not ready for that. Pilots have reduced agent involvement, though Kayak has not yet released numbers. The firmest figure in the interview comes from its events tool, which has handled policy-compliant bookings for 45,000 attendees across more than 130 events.

In a market where Navan, Spotnana and the large agencies are all building the same all-in-one platform, Kayak's real advantage is 20 years of leisure traffic and user-experience expertise. The question for investors is whether consumer polish can win over corporate procurement teams, a group that has historically cared more about the invoice than the interface.

Or Cheat —

Every marketing budget is really a capital allocation decision, and travel companies are moving a growing share of theirs to content creators.

The numbers explain why. eMarketer expects social media creator revenue to exceed $21B this year, up nearly 17% and 92% of destination marketing organizations say they are maintaining or increasing influencer budgets. Hyatt, IHG and Marriott all told Skift’s Creator Summit they are leaning harder on the channel. Why, again?

The appeal is lower customer acquisition costs: creators reach younger travelers more cheaply than search ads or online travel agency commissions, and the content keeps working long after the trip. The cost is less visible on the income statement. Leaving the strategy a viable cheat.

The U.S. Open nearly doubled creator credentials to almost 100 this year for a tournament that drew more than a million attendees, over 40% of them from outside New York. Paying guests noticed, from a viral clip of a ring light set up mid-match to Norwegian Cruise Line passengers objecting to a creators-only first look at a new waterpark.

I perceive that in effect, the business is running a subsidy: the acquisition cost of future customers is being paid partly by current ones, in the form of a worse experience, and those current customers are often the most valuable. Hospitality-suite holders and repeat cruisers are the high-margin, high-loyalty segment that marketing budgets exist to replace, not to annoy.

Some of the backlash may be misattributed. The U.S. Open says the disruptive suite guests were not credentialed creators, and Norwegian calls its preview a routine launch. But that is part of the problem. Creator programs are easy to fund and hard to measure, so the reach tends to be counted while the damage to existing customers often is not. I’ll conclude with this; that until companies weigh the reach a creator brings against the lifetime value of the guests seated nearby, they cannot really say whether the program pays for itself.

Let the fall season sprinkle in. ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

They are among roughly 5,700 people still missing after a slab of ice and rock broke from a glacier near Langtang Lirung on the morning of Aug. 26 and fell nearly 4,000 feet, sending a torrent of water and boulders down the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers. The flood erased the Rasuwagadhi border post with Tibet and tore through Syabrubesi and Dhunche, the towns where hikers begin the Langtang and Gosaikunda treks. More than 1,450 people have died, making it Nepal’s deadliest disaster since the 2015 earthquake.

Now the country’s tourism industry, which supports more than a million jobs, faces a second blow: travelers who are staying away from places the water never reached.

Within a week of the flood, about a fifth of the autumn bookings at the Dom Himalaya Hotel in Kathmandu’s Thamel district had been canceled, its managing director, Mandip Giri, told The Kathmandu Post. The September-to-November season brings in nearly 40% of Nepal’s foreign visitors.

Only the trekking routes that depend on the road through Syabrubesi are closed. Everest, the Annapurnas, Manaslu, Mustang, Pokhara and Chitwan sit in separate river systems and were untouched.

“Except Rasuwa, the rest of Nepal is intact,” said Sagar Pandey, the president of the Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal, which counts 118 guides and trail workers among the missing.

The industry has also become part of the relief effort. Guides, cooks and porters joined search teams in the first days after the flood, and helicopter companies that usually ferry trekkers stood by for evacuations. Tour operators including Intrepid Travel say they are supporting host families along routes that pass through the disaster zone.

Operators and aid workers say travelers can help most by keeping their plans. Those booked in Langtang are being moved to other regions or to spring, which keeps their deposits in Nepal. Visitors are urged to hire Nepali-owned agencies and licensed guides, to tip generously and to give through established channels such as the government’s disaster relief fund, UNICEF or the Nepal Red Cross.

What they should not do, operators say, is visit the flood zone, where relief convoys still need the road and crews are installing temporary Bailey bridges to reconnect Syabrubesi.

Nepal’s tourism minister, Khadak Raj Paudel, has urged travelers not to cancel, describing a visit this season as a way to support a grieving country rather than simply a holiday.

“This is not simply a natural disaster,” Ms. Mainali said, as she sorted through donated children’s clothing in her Kathmandu office.

Visit She Guides Trek for support relief efforts. Trek with Purpose!

Global Giving : Nepal Relief & Support

Good morning. It’s the last week in September, last week in Q3. Are we really ready to close this out 🤔

Be First —

Here is a curious business proposition: sell hotel rooms and deliberately make no money doing it. Uber began offering hotel bookings in April through a partnership with Expedia, and chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told the Skift Global Forum that the business runs at break-even by design. The logic, such as it is, rests on customer acquisition costs, the quiet tax on every online travel agency. Because Uber generates its own traffic rather than buying it from Google, it can pass the booking margin back to Uber One subscribers as discounts of 10%, and up to 20% at some properties.

The real asset is the membership base: more than 50M paying members who, by Khosrowshahi's account, spend three times as much as non-members. So hotels are less a revenue line than a retention tool, which is a perfectly respectable thing for a subscription business to want. Khosrowshahi points to precedent. Uber was 95% rideshare when he arrived in 2017 and is now roughly evenly split between rides and delivery. Vrbo rentals are due in the app later this year via the same Expedia plumbing, while flights wait until Uber learns whether travelers will actually book trips in an app built for impulse. That is the open question. Ordering dinner and choosing where to spend a week are different decisions, and it is not obvious they belong on the same screen.

One more detail worth noting first: Khosrowshahi ran Expedia before joining Uber and still sits on its board, which makes Expedia the supplier to what could become a front door that competes with its own.

Be Smarter —

Now, what does a cruise company do when it’s thirsty for growth, and a sinking stock?

It buys dry land which is kinda sorta smart. Royal Caribbean said on Wednesday it had agreed to acquire a 50% stake in Caribbean resorts operator Sandals Resorts International for $3B, which values the resort chain at $6B. The price is not outrageous: roughly 10x forward EBITDA, paid for with committed debt financing from Morgan Stanley, with closing expected in early 2027 and the deal expected to add to earnings next year.

Borrowed money, a mid-cycle multiple, and a promise of accretion is a familiar recipe. It tends to look clever or reckless depending on what demand does next. The context matters. Royal Caribbean's shares have fallen about 25% over the past year after it cut its revenue growth forecasts on weaker demand for European sailings, and the industry is again in turmoil, with the war in the Middle East denting its post-pandemic recovery. The strategic logic is reasonable enough. Caribbean cruising and Caribbean all-inclusives have increasingly been chasing the same traveller, and Royal Caribbean plans to combine cruises with resort stays, so the company has chosen to join its competitor rather than fight it. But this is half a company, not a whole one.

The family of Sandals founder Gordon Stewart, who died in 2021, keeps the other half, and the joint venture's board will be jointly led by Royal Caribbean chief Jason Liberty and Sandals executive chairman Adam Stewart. For investors, the question is whether a cruise line can earn resort-level returns while sharing control with the family.

For travelers, the question is whether ship plus beach is a product people want or simply a bundle that is convenient for the seller.

Or Cheat —

I did listen in on a few UN talks over the past week. Some I skimmed.

Although when the UN starts worrying about your distribution strategy, it is worth paying attention, since regulators tend to follow. António Guterres used this year’s World Tourism Day message, themed on AI, to warn that the technology is changing how travelers choose destinations and how the industry operates, and that, left unchecked, it can funnel tourists to the same few places and platforms, leaving many worthwhile destinations behind. In plain terms, this is a warning about cheating disguised as concentration, and concentration is what every large travel company is trying to achieve, from Uber positioning itself as the front door to hotels to the online travel agencies angling to be the default inside AI chatbots. For platform shareholders, that sounds like a moat; for a boutique hotel in a secondary city, it looks more like a toll booth. Nothing binding follows from a World Tourism Day message. But with US-China rivalry making it harder for the UN to build unified and enforceable governance frameworks for AI, rules are more likely to arrive country by country, and travel companies would do well to show that their AI spreads demand rather than concentrating it before someone else frames the issue for them.

See y’all in Q4! ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

For most of the travel industry, the Falklands have long been a footnote: a windswept stop on the way to Antarctica, a penguin colony visited by cruise passengers who spend a single afternoon ashore before sailing on. That footnote is now attached to a geopolitical dispute involving the presidents of Argentina and the United States, and travel companies that build itineraries a year in advance are starting to pay attention.

The dispute is not new. Britain and Argentina fought a ten-week war over the islands in 1982, and the sovereignty question never went away. What changed this month is the involvement of Washington. President Trump said in an interview that the American position on the islands — officially neutral for decades — was “one of many” under review. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, seized on the remark, telling the country in a national address that “winds of change” favorable to Argentina’s claim “are blowing around the world.” He has since argued that the roughly 4,000 Falkland Islanders do not have a legitimate right to self-determination, a position that breaks with the overwhelming outcome of a 2013 referendum, in which more than 99 percent of islanders who voted chose to remain British.

The people most directly affected have been notably measured in public. The Falkland Islands Legislative Assembly, the territory’s elected government, issued a statement responding to Mr. Milei’s address that pointedly did not name Argentina and mentioned him only once, in passing. “The Falkland Islands are a self-governing British Overseas Territory, and our future is a matter for the people who live here to decide,” the statement said, adding that this right is grounded in international law and “is not altered by the statements of any other government.”

That restraint is deliberate, longtime observers of Falklands politics say. Islanders have heard sovereignty rhetoric from Buenos Aires before and have learned not to let it dictate their own posture. When Britain’s government followed up with formal guidance reassuring companies that do business in the islands, Jack Ford, chair of the Legislative Assembly, welcomed it in strikingly commercial terms, calling it confirmation that things remain “very much business as usual.” He described the guidance as reaffirming the islands’ “rights to develop our natural resources for the benefit of the people in the Falklands,” and said it gave reassurance “to those within the Falklands but also companies seeking to do business here.”

That framing matters for travel executives. The islanders are not describing a security crisis. They are describing a commercial reassurance exercise — which suggests that, for now at least, the people who actually run tourism, fishing and hospitality operations on the ground do not consider bookings or access to be at risk.

For travel executives, the diplomatic back-and-forth matters less than a simpler fact: getting to the Falklands is not easy, and it depends on very few moving parts.

Most visitors reach the islands on one LATAM Airlines flight a week, departing Santiago, Chile, on Saturdays and stopping in Punta Arenas before landing at Mount Pleasant, a Royal Air Force base outside Stanley. A second, twice-weekly option is a British military charter from Oxfordshire, refueling at Ascension Island, open to civilians on a limited number of seats. There is no other scheduled commercial service. A destination that depends on one airline’s single weekly rotation has, in effect, no backup plan if that rotation is disrupted.

That thinness has not mattered much in ordinary times. It becomes more relevant when one of the two governments with influence over regional air corridors — Argentina controls airspace and airports the LATAM route depends on — is the same government escalating a sovereignty dispute. There is no indication Argentina intends to interfere with the flight. But travel risk managers say they now have to consider it, where a month ago they did not.

The bigger commercial exposure may be at sea. More than 40 expedition ships call at the Falklands each austral summer, from November through March — a season that begins in about six weeks. Many of those voyages originate in Ushuaia, the Argentine port at the tip of Patagonia, where the government has announced plans for a new integrated naval base explicitly intended, officials said, to help “monitor and control natural resources and sovereignty” in the South Atlantic. Ushuaia is also the fastest sea link to the islands, cutting nearly a day and a half off the alternative route.

Cruise operators say they have received no signal that itineraries are at risk. But the coincidence of a naval buildup at a departure port and a sovereignty dispute over the destination is the kind of thing insurers price in before it becomes a problem, not after.

Underlying all of it is money. Mr. Milei has called an offshore project near the islands, known as Sea Lion, an “urgent danger” that could give companies the capacity to extract oil within months, entrenching what he views as illegitimate British control. Argentina’s government has opened proceedings against 45 companies it says are linked to unauthorized drilling nearby, and lawmakers are considering a bill that would toughen penalties for resource extraction in the area.

The irony, largely unremarked on so far, is that the oil development Argentina wants to stop would also make the Falklands a larger, wealthier, more accessible market — more flights, more infrastructure, more reasons for travelers to come. Stopping the oil, in other words, may also mean keeping the islands exactly as thinly connected as they are today.

British officials have shown no sign of budging.

Defense Secretary Wes Streeting said, calling the country’s commitment “absolute and unshakeable.” Whether Washington’s ambiguity resolves in Britain’s favor, or Argentina’s, remains the open question.

For tour operators, cruise lines and their insurers, the practical checklist is narrower than the diplomacy: whether the United States makes any formal policy change, whether LATAM’s routing through Argentina holds, how cruise lines handle their Ushuaia departures this season, and how political-risk premiums move in response. None of it has shifted yet. But a dispute that seemed settled in 1982 is, once again, something the travel industry cannot simply ignore.

Good morning. Warsh stood up. Starlink is making progress. LA28 is moving in the right direction. Let’s get into this moment.

Be First —

We have to begin with the Fed decision to raise the FED interest rate this past Wednesday. Shocking, I know, this was a first for me. Many, including myself, were distressed that Kevin Warsh would be lower rates to simply appease this administration, free from attack.

Trump picked him in January largely on the expectation that he would cut them.

Yet the Fed voted unanimously last Wednesday to raise rates by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75%-4%, first increase since 2023. The reason wasn’t hard to find. Consumer price inflation (CPI) was 2.4% in January, but those pesky crude prices, driven largely by the Iran war, pushed it to a three-year high of 4.2% in May, and it was still 3.4% in August.

A central bank that had waited for inflation to fade by itself would now be waiting rather a long time. One could quibble over whether a quarter point does much against an oil shock, which is a supply problem that interest rates only indirectly address.

But the point of the move is as much about credibility as arithmetic. A new chair with a dovish reputation, facing a president who wants the lowest rates in the world, had to show that he means what he says about price stability. In addition, that the vote was unanimous suggests the committee did not find this a close call.

On a previous Margin Call, we discussed why these rates are concering for the sector. The TLDR is America is built on debt. Airlines, cruise lines, and hotel groups to be sector specific are capital intensive and carry loads of debt.

But inflation has been doing more damage than the Fed predicted. Diesel hit a record $6.40 a gallon last week, and crude has been above $100 a barrel. Jet fuel is not diesel, but the two are close cousins, and fuel is among the largest costs an airline has. Meanwhile, a household whose fuel and grocery bills keep climbing will cut the holiday before it cuts the commute, and travel is the classic discretionary line item. Persistent inflation also tends to make rates go higher and stay there longer, which would be worse for a capital-heavy sector than one modest hike now. There is a real cost: a stronger dollar, if it comes, makes the US pricier for foreign visitors, and financing gets a bit harder. And the Fed can do nothing about the oil price itself, which depends on events in the Gulf. But if the choice is between a small dose of tightening now and a long stretch of inflation eating into travellers’ budgets, the industry should probably take the former.

Did Warsh just stand up to the administration? Will the real Warsh stand up? Find out on the next episode of Federal Reserve-Z.

Be Smarter —

There was a time when in-flight Wi-Fi meant paying $10 for the privilege of watching a loading bar, and airlines could shrug when it failed. No longer. Starlink has gone from a nice extra to something closer to a boarding requirement, with Alaska, Hawaiian, United, Southwest, American and Frontier signed up, while Delta and JetBlue have placed their bets on Amazon’s rival Leo. Some flyers have mentioned to me that they would rather skip an airline than fly one without it. So this still remains a smart investment, right? I only ask because the bill is hefty. Industry estimates put installation at roughly $500,000 per single-aisle jet, plus around $180,000 a year in fees, and widebodies cost more. Just the annual fees on United’s 141 older 737-800s come to about $25 million, which is a lot of money to spend so passengers can stay on Slack at 35,000 feet.

The rollout has been a bit sluggish. United has fitted about a third of its fleet and needs roughly 110 installs a month to hit its 1,000-aircraft target by year-end, and Southwest, which only launched in June, is at 1%. Alaska, meanwhile, is running ahead of schedule. I came across this application that tracks Starlink’s installation progress.

The bet is that connected passengers book more and complain less. The unanswered question is who ultimately pays for it: airlines, ad-funded free Wi-Fi, or the passenger.

Or Cheat —

I’ll start with the headline number, because everyone else will: $40 billion for the LA28 Games. But I’d note that this is the top of a range. The study from the LA County Economic Development Corporation and LA28 puts the economic impact anywhere between $20.5 billion and $40.6 billion, and jobs supported between 126,000 and 224,000. When your best case is double your worst case, I’d call that a forecast with a wide margin of doubt. The travel-relevant numbers deserve more attention than the headline. The organisers expect about two million visitors, spending $1.6 billion to $4.3 billion in Los Angeles County. That works out to somewhere between $800 and $2,150 a head, and the gap between those two figures is the difference between a good Games for hotels and a mediocre one.

I find the “no-build” approach the most encouraging part, worthy of useful cheat. Using existing venues means most of the $8.35 billion in capital spending goes to roads, transit and airports, which visitors will use and residents will keep, rather than to stadiums that end up as expensive lawn ornaments, a familiar Olympic outcome. It also means the risk is less about overbuilding and more about whether LAX and the freeways cope in the summer of 2028. Hoteliers and airlines, I think, can take the projections as a reason to plan capacity now, but not yet as a reason to book the champagne. Games forecasts have a habit of arriving a little optimistic and departing a little disappointed. The early hospitality packages already on sale suggest at least some demand is real.

Let’s conquer this week. ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

"These mountains and my childhood home have a special place in my heart. They inspire my music and my life. I hope being here does the same for you.”

-Dolly Parton

Sevier County, Tennessee, is the kind of place that used to appear in economic surveys mostly as a cautionary example—a swath of the Smokies where subsistence farming gave way, slowly and without much fanfare, to not much of anything. Dolly Parton, who was born there in 1946, the fourth of twelve children in a one-room cabin with no running water, liked to tell the story a particular way: she promised herself, before she had any reason to believe the promise was keepable, that if she ever made it out she would find a way to bring the jobs back in with her. That promise took a long and circuitous route before it became Dollywood.

The land itself had already lived several lives by the time Parton got to it. In 1961, it opened as Rebel Railroad, a modest Wild West attraction built around a coal-fired steam train, the kind of roadside stop that once dotted the approach to the Smokies. Art Modell, who would go on to own the Cleveland Browns, bought the property in 1970 and renamed it Goldrush Junction, a title that lasted only as long as his enthusiasm for it. In 1977, the Herschend family—Ozark showmen who had made their name running Silver Dollar City, an 1880s-themed park in Branson, Missouri, built around a cave they’d once leased from its original owners—purchased the land and rechristened it Silver Dollar City, Tennessee, folding in the blacksmiths, the gristmill, and the general run of Appalachian craft demonstrations that were their specialty. It grew, steadily and unremarkably, through the early eighties: a respectable regional attraction, the sort of place a family might stop for an afternoon on the way to Gatlinburg.

What changed its fortunes was a television interview. Sometime in the mid-eighties, Parton, by then a bona fide star with “9 to 5” and “Jolene” behind her, told Barbara Walters that she dreamed of building a theme park in her home county—something that would bring tourism, and with it employment, to a corner of Tennessee that had historically exported its young people rather than employed them. Silver Dollar City’s general manager happened to catch the interview and made the call. The pitch the Herschends offered was simple enough: rather than build a “Dollyland” from scratch, as she’d apparently imagined, she could take a controlling stake in an operation that already had the infrastructure, staff, and thirty-thousand-square-foot commissary of a working park, and remake it in her own image. She said yes. The skeptics were not impressed. People magazine, previewing the rebrand, dismissed it in print as Dolly’s “$20 million hillbilly park,” and the market-research consensus at the time held that swapping the Silver Dollar City name for Dollywood might net an extra ten thousand visitors a year, if that.

On May 3, 1986, the park reopened as Dollywood, with a new entrance called Rivertown Junction, a whitewater raft ride, and a scale replica of the cabin Parton had grown up in, furnished, down to the detail, with the poverty she’d once lived through. Parton herself would later admit that she spent much of opening day not greeting guests but watching the parking lot, convinced that no one was going to come. She was wrong by a considerable margin. Attendance for the season came in at 1.3 million—more than double what Silver Dollar City had drawn the year before, and more than a hundred times what the experts had forecast for the name change alone. It was, by any reasonable accounting, an act of economic alchemy: a woman who had once picked cotton and coal-mined poverty out of her own childhood had built, almost overnight, the single biggest tourist draw in the state.

Four decades on, the figures involved have a way of sounding invented, the sort of round, triumphant numbers that press releases are made of, until you notice how consistently they check out. Annual attendance had climbed, by 2025, to roughly four million, making Dollywood, by a comfortable margin, the most visited ticketed attraction in Tennessee, ahead of any museum, aquarium, or stretch of Nashville honky-tonk. A state-commissioned study put the park’s yearly economic footprint at some $1.8 billion, a sum that diffuses outward from the ticket booths into the region’s hotels, pancake houses, taffy shops, and the small, half-hidden businesses that a tourist economy tends to spawn without anyone quite planning it. More than twenty-three thousand jobs in the area trace back to it. Sevier County, which ranks near the bottom of Tennessee counties by population, ranks third in the tax revenue it sends back to Nashville—an inversion that flatters no spreadsheet quite so much as it flatters the woman who engineered it.

What distinguishes Dollywood from the ordinary run of tourist-economy success stories is the degree to which Parton treated the park as an instrument of social policy rather than an end in itself. In 1991, the Dollywood Foundation introduced what it called the Buddy Program, a modest scheme of encouragement and small cash incentives designed to keep Sevier County students from dropping out of high school. It is not the kind of intervention that usually makes a dent—until you look at the dropout rate, which fell, in the years that followed, from thirty-five per cent to six. There is a plausible argument that this single, unglamorous statistic did more to alter the trajectory of the county than the roller coasters ever did, though the roller coasters, admittedly, paid for it.

The rest of Parton’s philanthropy in the region reads almost as an accumulation of quiet corrections to circumstances she herself had once lived through: disaster relief funds distributed to families burned out of their homes by the 2016 Gatlinburg wildfires; an Imagination Library that has, by now, mailed free books to children well beyond the borders of Tennessee, in the kind of scaling that most nonprofits only aspire to. None of it was accidental, and none of it, on close inspection, was sentimental in the way the songs sometimes were. It was infrastructure, built slowly, and disguised as generosity.

Parton died on August 25th, at eighty, after a brief illness, and the tributes that followed tended toward the predictable notes—the wigs, the one-liners, the voice. Less remarked upon, though arguably more durable, is the fact that a woman who grew up without indoor plumbing left behind a functioning regional economy, still operating on schedule, its payroll still meeting, its dropout rate still low. Dollywood’s gates did not close for her passing; they are not expected to. That, perhaps, is the more fitting monument—not the rhinestones, but the fact that the jobs are still there on Monday morning.

In addition, Dolly Parton’s Nashville SongTeller Hotel to open later this month.

The SongTeller Hotel, dedicated to the life and legacy of the late country music star, is slated to open Sept. 29, featuring a 20,000-square-foot immersive museum.

Good morning. Welcome back to the grind, after the holidays left us with much to discuss and dissect. The flights continued to take off, the hotels enjoyed some bookings, simply, the world didn’t stop.

Be First —

We missed the “meeting of the minds” when travel executives met with President Trump and a few administrators to discuss possibly reaching 100 million international visitors by year, 2030.

Ambitious without a doubt. Currently, the US rests around 68 million international visitors recorded in year, 2025. 86% of the pre-pandemic average but 5.5% decreasing year over year. With this moving trend, it goes without saying that the US will have to shift towards becoming a favorable destination especially to international visitors to fill the 32 million travelers gap. So who invented the 100 million international visitors goal?

Well, the formula isn’t rooted in much of any mathematical basis — as in, it’s not following a normal growth percentage that would be applied to annual tracker for international visitors. But rather, rooted in vanity. The rub is that France and Spain take the top two spots with 102 and 97 million international visitors in year 2025. As always the goal with the administration is to be first, not proper. Its kwahsawn not kruhsahnt. I’d assume that the administration baked into the model expectations that France and Spain are on the decrease along with the middle stragglers.

Although, the data shows that France and Spain shouldn’t be the US’s concern, if we focus soley on the competitive field. While the US is only netting 68 million international visitors, the US remains the world largest tourism economy. But for how long, China’s major post-pandemic rebound, China is currently on track to overtake the US by 2036 as the world’s largest tourism economy.

And we could focus on the proposed benefits of the 100 million international visitation goal figures such as an additional $81b in spending or the 400K American jobs to be added. But it would be nonsensical. Like all the proposed benefits if I had $100M deposited into my bank account such as finding the cure for rabies in blue footed boobies whom exist exclusively on the Galapagos coast.

Be Smarter —

I found it interesting that Jazeera Airways just posted the best operating margin of any airline to report this earnings season, which is the kind of sentence that usually comes with an asterisk the size of a 787. Here’s the asterisk: the Kuwaiti low-cost carrier flew 44% fewer seats in the second quarter than a year earlier, after its home hub, Kuwait International Airport, shut down for part of the quarter amid regional instability. Flying half as much is not, generally, an airline’s preferred growth strategy. And yet Jazeera grew group operating revenue 46% year-on-year, landing a 17% operating margin — a number most full-service carriers would frame and hang in the boardroom.

The trick, if you can call supply and demand a trick, is that an airport closure is an excellent way to make your remaining seats feel exclusive. With half its network grounded, the flights Jazeera did operate were suddenly in high demand, and fares climbed to match — no fare sale, no seat-filling gymnastics required. It’s a useful reminder that airline profits depend less on how many seats you fly and more on your nerve about what you charge for the ones you’ve got, and Jazeera apparently had plenty of nerve to spare. The real test comes once Kuwait’s airport reopens fully and the airline has to prove it can be just as profitable with all its planes back in the air — thriving on scarcity is one thing; thriving on abundance is the harder trick. Jazeera will have to be smart when navigating this eventual change.

Or Cheat —

Here’s the trouble with boutique hotels: the thing that makes them lovable is the thing that makes them sellable. Take Sharan Pasricha. He built The Hoxton out of one hotel in Shoreditch, made it into one of the defining brands of its type, and then — sensibly, in this columnist’s view — merged it into Accor’s lifestyle arm in 2021, keeping a third of a company now worth, per the bankers Accor has hired to explore a New York listing, somewhere between $3.4bn and $5.8bn. He also still owns Estelle Community, three hotels, fully his, no board to answer to. One man, two structures, and the contrast tells you most of what you need to know. Skift’s Rafat Ali details the trend perfectly, Hilton has bought Graduate and NoMad, Hyatt has bought Standard International, Marriott has bought citizenM, and in every case the buyer wants the same narrow slice: the name, the management contracts, the pipeline. Not the buildings. The founder keeps those. Which is another way of saying the big chains have figured out it’s cheaper to let small, talented people invent the next cool hotel brand than to invent it themselves — and then simply buy the invention once it works.

Is it a cheat? And why do founders take the deal? Not, mostly, because they’re tired of it, though I’m sure some are. It’s distribution, and distribution is boring, and boring is usually where the real explanation lives. An independent hotel gives up 15 to 25 per cent of every booking to the OTAs; Marriott or Hilton can offer a lower toll road and tens of millions of loyalty members who’ll book direct. At some point that gap stops being an inconvenience and starts being the whole argument. The holdouts — Firmdale, Peninsula, Oberoi, Oetker, Hoshino — aren’t holding out through force of personality. They’re holding out because somebody, usually a family, owns the real estate outright and isn’t on a fund’s clock. That’s the asset that patient capital actually buys: time. And it’s precisely the asset that gets stripped out of the asset-light deals that make a brand easy to acquire in the first place — which leaves the open question, one I don’t think the industry has answered yet, of whether a big hotel company can buy “taste” thirty hotels at a time and still have any left by hotel three hundred.

Glad to be back at the desk, I love that we all grind in this industry. ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

The pond looks serene. The floor-to-ceiling windows catch the light just right. A young woman leans toward the camera to say she has never seen a view like this one, then directs her more than 300,000 viewers to a booking link below.

None of it is real. Not the pond, according to the owner of the Arizona resort the video claims to show. Possibly not even the woman: an AI-detection company, Resemble.AI, flagged her as synthetic with near-total confidence.

The video is one of dozens circulating on TikTok Go, a feature the company introduced this year to let users book hotels and travel experiences directly from videos in their feed, through partners including Expedia, Booking.com, Viator and Trip.com. Creators earn a commission, typically around 5 percent, on each booking their content produces. It is, in effect, TikTok Shop for travel.

It is also, increasingly, a showcase for hotels that do not look anything like their videos suggest.

At the Ambiente Sedona, a luxury adults-only resort known for its red-rock views, Resemble.AI identified 17 videos it assessed as AI-generated with at least 80 percent confidence. Some spliced in footage from other properties. One transformed the adults-only resort into a family destination, complete with children playing by a pool that, like much else in the clip, does not exist. Only one of the 17 videos carried any label disclosing that it might be artificial.

The appeal to creators is straightforward. A conventional travel video requires airfare, a hotel stay and hours of filming and editing. A fabricated one can be generated in minutes, at negligible cost, and pays the same commission if it converts a viewer into a booking. Some accounts have gone further, tagging affiliate links to hotels that are not even available through TikTok Go, betting that volume and spectacle will outrun scrutiny.

For travelers, the consequences are tangible. Rooms at the Ambiente Sedona start above $1,300 a night; a guest who books based on an invented suite or a nonexistent pond may simply be out of luck on arrival.

For hoteliers, the injury runs deeper than any single video. A brand identity built over years — the design, the service, the amenities a property actually offers — can be rewritten in fifteen seconds by a creator, or an algorithm, the hotel has never met. Properties can request that misleading videos be taken down, but say they cannot keep pace with how quickly new ones appear, and platform enforcement has been inconsistent.

@lachelitaaaThe dreamiest place 🖤 #ambientesedona #arizona #sedona @AmbienteSedona

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That leaves owners with an uneasy calculation. Fabricated or not, the videos generate views, and views generate interest that can translate into real reservations. Ambiente Sedona’s ownership, while disturbed by the inaccuracies, acknowledges the attention has its upside. Rejecting that exposure outright is difficult to justify when the metrics keep improving — even as the hotel loses more say over what its own name now represents online.

The episode is likely to be an early test case rather than an isolated one. As AI-generated video becomes cheaper and harder to distinguish from the real thing, platforms that monetize influence will face growing pressure to verify what they are selling — and to whom the commission checks are really being paid.

Good morning. Happy first day of September! Already a month into Margin Call on Pay Me In Plane Tickets and it’s truly such a joy to deliver and hear the responses. Enjoying our growing community. Remember its PMIPT not PIMP — we’ll leave that for 50.

Be First —

Just last week on Margin Call, we discussed Google buying Spirit’s bankrupt data for a mere $10M.

Now, Google would like you to believe it has spent the past year quietly building the connective tissue between search and shopping, and this week it switched a rather important light on: you can now book a hotel room, in dollars, without leaving the AI chat window. This is either the natural endpoint of “search” — a page that finds things — evolving into “commerce” — a page that sells things — or it is Google finally admitting what search always secretly was. The company has signed up the usual suspects. Marriott, Expedia, Booking.com, Hilton, IHG. And insists, hand on heart, that the results you see are ranked the same way organic search always has been, no ads, no thumb on the scale. I believe this the way I believe any tech company telling me its ad-free era will last: sincerely, and with a raised eyebrow, because nobody builds a distribution funnel this valuable and leaves it un-monetized for long. That would be a first, if ever. The tell is that Google itself won’t rule out ads later — which in corporate dialect means the meter is already running, it’s just not itemized on your receipt yet.

Flights are the more interesting story precisely because nothing happened. You can track prices, you can burn miles, you can build an itinerary — and then Google politely walks you off its own platform to actually pay for the thing, the one part of the transaction that would have made this launch genuinely disruptive to the Expedias and the airlines of the world. That restraint is either commendable caution about a much messier market. Think dynamic pricing, fare rules, a dozen legacy reservation systems held together with duct tape or possibly, evidence that Google hasn’t yet worked out how to take a cut without picking a fight with the airlines it needs as partners. And I say fight, loosely. Because even with the combined might of all US airlines if ever tied together - Alphabet could buy all US airlines, take all of their hubs and turn them into ping pong rooms. As I mentioned earlier, layer onto that the small, unrelated, entirely coincidental fact that Google recently bought a trove of data from the corpse of Spirit Airlines, and you have a company assembling a very large machine one gear at a time, while insisting each gear was purchased for reasons that have nothing to do with the others.

For reference 😂

Be Smarter —

United added ten new international cities for summer 2027, and the mix says more about strategy than the press release does. Most are classic leisure routes — Ljubljana, Ibiza, Catania, Valencia, the Azores — the kind that fill an A321XLR's economy cabin with sun-seekers chasing cheap fares. But two additions stand apart: daily Newark–Luxembourg, aimed at the banking corridor linking Wall Street to the Grand Duchy, and Washington Dulles–Toulouse, which conveniently connects Airbus's American and European operations. That's the smart part — United is using low-risk, high-volume leisure growth to soak up its expanding long-haul fleet while quietly building higher-yield corporate routes that are stickier than a sunseeker's summer plans, since business travelers don't rebook over a nine-dollar fare difference. It's effectively a portfolio approach to network planning: breadth for the loyalty program, depth for the corporate accounts, without betting the expansion entirely on either.

Or Cheat —

Uber has spent the past several years insisting that its fares are simply the honest arithmetic of inflation and driver pay, a claim that has always required the listener to not ask too many follow-up questions. A good friend of mine forwarded to me this new and intriguing investigation from More Perfect Union. The outlet found that the “insurance fee” tacked onto rides — which Uber says reflects real risk — instead moves in near lockstep with the price of the ride itself: one driver, running the identical route with the identical rider, watched the charge swing from $13.75 to $50. That is not underwriting. That is a second fare, wearing a lab coat or a widely complicated yet clever cheat.

The more interesting detail, and the one that should worry regulators more than riders, is who is actually collecting this money. The insurance flows to Aleka, a Hawaii-domiciled captive insurer owned outright by Uber and staffed by its own former executives, which by the investigation’s accounting retains 95 cents of every insurance dollar inside the parent company.

Equivalent of paying your own bar tab and calling it a business expense — technically a transaction, substantively a shuffle. And because Aleka’s sole customer is Uber, it owes no one a public accounting of its books. Uber’s on-the-record defense is that the fee tracks distance, duration, time of day and weather, not price — a claim the company is, conveniently, the only party able to verify.

Enjoy the first day of September my fellow readers. Margin Call is on a break, returning September 14th. ✊🏾 Margin Call is issued weekly on Tuesdays, found only on Pay Me in Plane Tickets!

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!