#15: June Travel Links

Some cool things from around the internet

Hi there! I’m Jess 👋

This week, I’m doing an old-school link roundup. Hope you like it!

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🤓 Things from around the internet 🤓

🐕 Chief Dog Officer - Royal Caribbean’s newest ship has a dog named Rover that permanently lives onboard. Rover is cared for by a crew member (I presume full-time). In addition to making guests and crew happy, it’s clearly a publicity and social media play. Rover has 45K followers on Instagram, and it’s only been a few months.

🐈 $60k for a cat door?! - Meanwhile, Celebrity (also owned by Royal) spent €57,000 to allow a cat to have free rein of one of their ships. Okay, this was actually an April fool’s joke, but I’ll admit that I fell for it before reading the coments. Captain Kate has nearly a million Instagram followers.

🗺️ Map of all the rail lines in the world - Graduate student Zhaoxu Sui created a transit-style map of all the world’s passenger rail lines. Super cool to see in one place. Be patient, it takes a minute to load.

🎈 Airship Cruises - OceanSky Cruises plans to offer expedition-style trips to polar areas using the Airlander, a planned vehicle by Hybrid Air Vehicles. Oceansky’s first cruise will go to the North Pole and starts at $200,000. Why airships? They offer a few benefits according to Oceansky…

Airships can fly for days and don’t need airports for landing. They can land and access the remote and unexplored corners of the world. Their size allows us to provide large and comfortable cabins, lounges, fine dining areas, and big panoramic windows like no other current means of air travel.

Other companies have attempted similar products and not succeeded. Hope this one actually happens…

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👷 Building Airplanes 👷

💵 A Cycle of Misery: The Business of Building Commercial Aircraft - why it’s so hard to develop new airplanes.

🚨 Boeing’s long fall, and how it might recover - written shortly after the Alaska Airlines door blowout, the article felt like a follow-up to “The Case Against Boeing” from the New Yorker in 2019.

🇧🇷 A new competitor to Boeing and Airbus? - Embraer is exploring whether it should build a 737 competitor. Jon Ostrower and Brian Sumers discussed Embraer’s dilemma in more detail on a recent podcast episode.

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🗽 A couple NYT articles🗽

🌊 Photos from Pantelleria - I’m drawn to this place. Love the black and white photos.

🤠 Texas Hill Country Resorts - as a non-Texan, I only recently learned about this area. I’m increasingly interested in close-to-home vacations. May write something about this soon.

🏜️ Roadtrip around Saudi Arabia - Great photos and essay on the tourism push.

🇵🇦 How the drought in Panama affects the Canal - a few months old, but worth a read.

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🎧 Interviews I’m Listening To 🎧

👑 ”How I got here” was a podcast that interviewed CEOs and founders of tour operators, hotels, travel tech companies, and airlines. It’s particularly interesting to hear from tour operators, which get less attention than other companies. I recently discovered the podcast, but it looks like they quit in 2021 after producing 70 episodes. I’ve only listened to a few, but I’m planning to go through the archive.

✈️ Interview with United CEO Scott Kirby - Jon Ostrower and Brian Sumers interview United’s outspoken (and unusually honest) CEO. They ask good questions, and Kirby is one of the most interesting airline CEOs to listen to.

#3: The business of icebreaker cruises