#21: What I'm reading (October edition)
Travel-related links from around the web
Hello reader,
It’s been a while. If you’re new here, my name’s Jess and I write about the travel business.
First, a life update: I recently started a full-time job as the head of itinerary planning at Windstar Cruises! I’ll continue writing about the travel business, so nothing changes for you (and I’ll aim be transparent about potential conflicts of interest or biases).
Second, I recently returned from a one-month trip in Asia. Most of the time, I was scouting destinations for new Windstar cruise itineraries. I won’t share much, but I’m very excited about the new trips we’re developing. At the end of the trip, I took some time off in Japan - 5 days hiking and then a few days in Tokyo.
After so much time away and starting a full-time job, I’m just catching up. Today, I’ll share some quotes from travel-related pieces I’ve read recently.
Enjoy!
A new word: “Hotelification”
Full article in the NYT is here. Most of the piece is about how workplaces are changing, itself an interesting trend, but I was intrigued by this:
Transforming traditional offices into workspaces with hotel-like amenities is referred to as “hotelification.” In this new iteration, there is the additional layer of the “hospitality experience,” which Amy Campbell, an architect and senior associate at Gensler in San Francisco, describes as “anticipating the needs of others and then creating accommodations for that.” Ms. Campbell said she was seeing hotelification in all sectors, including residences and airports — and called it “a niche market that we’re going to see grow.”
I’ve observed this and didn’t have a word for it. More and more public spaces are indeed trying to feel like hotels - for better AND for worse. I may write about this at some point.
The lack of innovation in commercial airplanes is part of what makes air travel so safe
In the MIT Technology Review, Bryan Gardiner reviews three books related to technological complexity and the problems it creates. The whole article is worth reading but this section, reviewing John Downer’s new book Rational Accidents, was one I screenshotted and sent around to friends:
Jetliners are an example of what Downer calls a “catastrophic technology.” These are “complex technological systems that require extraordinary, and historically unprecedented, failure rates—of the order of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of operational hours between catastrophic failures.”
[…]
Downer, a professor of science and technology studies at the University of Bristol, does an excellent job in the first half of the book dismantling the idea that we can objectively recognize, understand, and therefore control all risk involved in such complex technologies. Using examples from well-known jetliner crashes, as well as from the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, he shows why there are simply too many scenarios and permutations of failure for us to assess or foresee such risks, even with today’s sophisticated modeling techniques and algorithmic assistance.
So how does the airline industry achieve its seemingly unachievable record of safety and reliability? It’s not regulation, Downer says. Instead, he points to three unique factors. First is the massive service experience the industry has amassed. Over the course of 70 years, manufacturers have built tens of thousands of jetliners, which have failed (and continue to fail) in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
This deep and constantly growing data set, combined with the industry’s commitment to thoroughly investigating each and every failure, lets it generalize the lessons learned across the entire industry—the second key to understanding jetliner reliability.
Finally is what might be the most interesting and counterintuitive factor: Downer argues that the lack of innovation in jetliner design is an essential but overlooked part of the reliability record. The fact that the industry has been building what are essentially iterations of the same jetliner for 70 years ensures that lessons learned from failures are perpetually relevant as well as generalizable, he says.
Source: Bryan Gardiner, Learning from Catastrophe, MIT Technology Review
🤯 Seriously, read the whole article.
How luxury travelers booked travel in the 1950s, 1970s, and now
I finally got around to reading McKinsey’s The State of Tourism and Hospitality in 2024 report. The whole thing is worth browsing, especially the section on luxury travel.
An interview with Matthew Upchurch, founder of the luxury travel advisor network Virtuoso, caught my attention for its perspective:
Matthew Upchurch: If you go back to the middle of the 20th century, more people booked directly with the actual providers than they do today. International flights were a high-end product. Walking into Pan Am airline’s office on Fifth Avenue in 1950 was like walking into Bergdorf Goodman. There was pleasure in it. There was also very little pricing complexity because there were essentially just four fare classes— day coach, night coach, day first class, and night first class.
[…]
Things changed in the 1970s, when airfare classes got more complicated, and many travel agents made money by basically becoming human interfaces to the airline reservation systems. Things changed again in the late 1990s with the arrival of the online travel agencies like Expedia and Travelocity. The idea then was the consumer could do it themselves, and it would be cheaper than paying for the travel agent’s labor. That did cause a large exit of agents from the industry.
But the true travel advisors, who were consultative and not transactional, continued to thrive by building on community knowledge and relationships. At Virtuoso, we never believed that all the baby boomers—who invented the personal chef, personal shopper, personal everything—would suddenly start doing travel DIY.
Source: McKinsey, State of Tourism and Hospitality 2024, page 36
Reminds me a little of my piece on the travel agency distribution channel, but I didn’t go back to the 1950s!
The paradox of collaboration and singular vision at Comme des Garçons
I’ll admit, this one’s not travel-related. On vacation, I became mildly obsessed with Japanese designers. A New Yorker profile of Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, is worth reading in full, but this section on collaboration was again, one that I screenshotted and sent to friends:
“Kawakubo’s experiences as a stylist had taught her the importance of creating a coherent identity”—a philosophy of design that is followed as strictly in the company’s Christmas cards as it is in the flagship stores. But the styling of that signature is a collaborative effort that demands an almost cultish attunement among the participants, and it is one of the paradoxes of Comme des Garçons that a designer obsessed with singularity and an entrepreneur allergic to beholdenness have spun such an elaborate web of dependence. In the workplace, Kawakubo’s laconic detachment—the refusal to explain herself—forces her employees, particularly the pattern cutters, to look inward, rather than to her, for a revelation of the all-important “something new.” Tanaka says, “The work is very hard, and I have to delve deep into my own understanding because her words are so few. But there’s always some give to the tautness. And I’m still moved by the collections. That’s why I’ve been here for so long.”
Comme des Garçons’ chief patterner, Yoneko Kikuchi, a thirty-year veteran of the firm, describes the arduous, if not mildly perverse, esoteric groping in the dark through which a collection comes into focus. It begins with a vision, or perhaps just an intuition, about a key garment that Kawakubo hints at with a sort of koan. She gives the patterners a set of clues that might take the form of a scribble, a crumpled piece of paper, or an enigmatic phrase such as “inside-out pillowcase,” which they translate, as best they can, into a muslin—the three-dimensional blueprint of a garment. Their first drafts are inevitably too concrete. “She always asks us to break down the literalness,” Kikuchi says. The quest proceeds behind closed doors, like a papal election, and successive meditations on the koan produce more or less adequate results. The staff calls the process by a deceptively playful English word, “catchball,” though as the deadline for a collection approaches, and Kawakubo is still dissatisfied, the “anguish and anger” mount in the cutting room. “We all want to please her,” Kikuchi explains, “and it’s sometimes hard for patterners who have come from other companies, because they just want you to tell them how wide the collar is supposed to be. But you can’t teach people to let go, and some end up leaving.” (“They make it sound more interesting than it is,” Kawakubo says, dryly. “The ideas aren’t as abstract as they used to be.”)
I also liked this documentary about Issey Miyake from the early 1990s. Check out this section on how they make “twist” pieces:
That’s it for today! Thanks for reading 😊