Over It: 6 Travel Trends That Need to Go Away

Plus, no, the Sagrada Familia is not done.

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All of these just need to stop, thanks.

The Wes Anderson-ification of Everything: It’s pastel, it’s sans-serif, it’s deeply twee, it’s absolutely everywhere, and it’s killing me. Director Wes Anderson’s signature style is gorgeous, but it’s also limited, and at times, kinda uncomfortable. His fans will balk. He’s creating a dream world, they’ll say. Ok, that’s fine. But what happens when that dream world is, say, the nation of India, as is the case in Anderson’s film The Darjeeling Limited. It is one thing, as a filmmaker, to create an imaginary world with a fixed visual vocabulary. It’s quite another for that same filmmaker, and a barrage of travel influencers behind him, to wholesale apply that vocabulary to the real world – to any place that is not their own. It’s reductive and it’s been done to death. Paging the Madonna Inn. Can we please get some visual variety back in here?

Residential-Style Architecture: For a while, everyone was very excited to book a hotel that looked like a living room. A nice living room, mind you. A living room filled with coffee table books and inexplicable knick knacks and Midcentury-dupe, boucle-clad armchairs. It was tasteful and restrained and was a lot like your house if it had nicer throw pillows, empty closets and a paid cleaning staff. Even cruise ships got in the game, decking out their observation lounges and libraries with non-functioning telescopes and star maps – presumably things that would adorn the homes of well-traveled, well-heeled, interesting people. In the rush to compete with home rental companies, many hotel brands thought they could cosplay as somebody’s nice-ish house. Never mind that people choose home rentals and hotels for very specific, distinct reasons. (To wit: Is there anything better than a room service caesar salad?) Never mind that people often book hotels because they want to feel like they’re… well… not at home. Brands big and small did it anyway, and if the collapse of Sonder – the kingpin of the post-Airbnb, millennial-coded, residential-dupe hospitality brands, right down to the cutesy printed sheets – is a bellwether, I’m guessing this trend is well on its way out.

Charging for Early Check-In: Oh, this one makes me murderous. Know why? Because any human being who turns up at a hotel seven hours before check-in is in a murderous, desperate situation. In most cases, they just got off a red eye where they got twelve total minutes of sleep. They are unshowered. They are jetlagged. They are under-caffeinated. They are sometimes accompanied by hungry, unshowered, jetlagged children, a state that increases murderousness exponentially. To then have a cheerful hotel associate tell you that, indeed, your room is ready but you can’t get into it until 4:00 pm without giving them $75? Any hotel that does this should not exist. You fail at hospitality. Goodbye.

Traveling Like Anthony Bourdain: Are you a white American man traveling with a full team of fixers, researchers, translators, and a camera crew from a globally-known media brand? No? You cannot travel like Anthony Bourdain. Sorry to break the news.

Weird Vibes in the Bar: Ok, so you book a place to stay that is ideally located, looks fabulous in the photos, and is the right price. You check in, and all seems well… until you go to the bar. Or have dinner in the restaurant. Or, god forbid, go to the pool. That’s where you discover that these spaces have entirely different vibes than the rest of the hotel. The bar that looked elegant online is full of thumping music and noisy college students. (Hello, every hotel in Boston.) The restaurant has a hot chef and is so jammed that you have to book well before you check in. And the pool… forget the pool. You don’t even want to know what’s happening over there. There was a notion a few years back – it persists in some ways – that the hotel bar or restaurant was a selling point, a reason to choose a hotel in and of itself. A good one could generate considerable buzz. I love this notion. I love being the traveler at the hotel bar. I love snagging a priority reservation because I’m a guest. But as a guest, you want to feel welcomed in the entire hotel.

The Obsession With Hidden Gems: Keep searching. Keep ChatGPT-ing itineraries until you’ve depleted all the drinkable water on planet earth. Let’s get real: What is truly hidden is usually too difficult to comfortably or even reasonably access. That is, the “unknown” places, the actual hidden gems you so desperately seek, are not often supported by convenient tourism infrastructure like hotels, paved roads, trains that run on time or at all, or drinkable water. This is an extreme way of saying that you will likely see stuff when you travel that a lot of other people have already seen. Even that cute little bistro on the side street that you just stumbled upon. You did not discover it. And you know what? That’s totally OK. In fact, this is great, because while these places may not be new to the world, they are new to you. No one will ever see the Eiffel Tower or Fushimi Inari or that lovely bistro exactly the way you will. Go see the things. Go tell the stories. Go talk about what you learn. And honor and appreciate the notion that you were not first.

The Sagrada Familia under construction, Barcelona / Laura Motta, 2018

News, Briefly

• The gardens around fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent’s home in Marrakech have long been open to the public, but there are some rumblings that the actual house, known as Villa Oasis, is also now open for tours. The cobalt blue exterior walls of the villa and the surrounding succulents, cacti, and fountains are iconic local sights, but the house, where Saint Laurent relaxed and entertained, has been off-limits. What seems clear, so far, is that you can’t just buy a ticket for an interior tour from the Musee Yves Saint Laurent, which operates the site. The interior is open for small, private tours that can be booked only through select tour operators and hotel concierges. And they’ll definitely cost more than a walk-up ticket to the gardens alone. La Sultana Experiences, for example, is offering a tour for up to five people for 50,000 MAD, or about $5,500. So yes, you can go. But special access comes at a special price.

• A new ancient Roman site on the Palatine Hill is newly open to the public. Sort of! The House of the Griffins dates back to the Roman Republic and has remarkably preserved mosaics and frescoes. You can’t view them in person, however, because they’re only reachable – like so many things in life – via a treacherous, narrow stairway. The site is meeting this challenge by allowing visitors to remotely “tour” the space with an archaeologist, who enters the rooms with a camera and livestreams video and narration. Is this creative? Yes. Does it help protect the home from damage? Yes. Is this kind of goofy? Also yes. Would I do it? You know I would.

• The British Museum is hiring a treasure hunter to help recover hundreds of lost antiquities that were stolen in 2023. Write your own punchline, etc.

• For everyone who’s like, what’s going on with the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s famous unfinished basilica, here’s an update. It was supposed to be completed in 2026 – which is also the centennial of the death of the church’s architect, Antoni Gaudi. A year of celebrations has been planned that includes special masses and commemorations. One snag – the church isn’t finished, and probably won’t be for another decade. The culprit? The pandemic, which slowed both construction and donations. There is still, however, stuff to celebrate and festivities are continuing as planned. The Jesus Tower, the tallest of the lot, is now complete and will be consecrated this year. With the completion of the tower in 2025, Sagrada Familia became the tallest church in the world, beating out Ulm Minster in Germany by about 1.4 meters.