#9: January Travel Links
Starting the year with some cool things from around the internet
Hi there! I’m Jess 👋
Bureau of Adventure is a newsletter about travel. This week, I’m doing an old-school link roundup. Hope you like it!
🤓 Things from around the internet 🤓
🇲🇽 NYTimes: 25 Essential Dishes to Eat in Mexico City - chefs and locals created a list of the top dishes (and where to eat them)
📐 Bloomberg: The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations - Fascinating. Two examples: jingles composed to make travel less stressful and specific lighting reduce suicides (yep 😔)
🏝️ Hustle: The wild business of desert island tourism (via Mauricio Preto) - people pay to be stranded on an islands as a vacation. My favorite quote:
Providing clients with the illusion of complete solitude is harder than it sounds. Even on the most remote islands on earth, isolation has to be manufactured:
Cerezo goes to great lengths to make sure local fishing boats don’t come into view of any island where a client is staying. This involves setting up a support team on a nearby island to “intercept” and pay off any boats that float too close.
Before a client is taken ashore, the island also has to be cleaned of debris to give it an untouched appearance. (Islands in the middle of the ocean are often magnets for trash.)
™️ Travel brands worth looking at ™️
👪 Boundless enables families to live as digital nomads. The company operates four hubs globally, where they have a school, co-working space, family-friendly home rentals, and community events. Families can live at one of the locations for a period of time or rotate every three months.
🇵🇰 Ishkar offers trips to places you might think are off-limits to travelers. I’ve got my eye on a trip to Pakistan. It’s not about conflict/war tourism or adventure. This is thoughtful, cultural tourism to places you wouldn’t otherwise go.
🛶 Much Better Adventures is a vetted marketplace of adventure tours (think kayaking and hiking). Much Better Adventures is not a tour operator. They list tours by local tour companies. I assume they take a lower margin than traditional tour operators that subcontract to these local companies, since the value seems quite good (though less cushy than companies like Backroads).
✉️ Newsletters & Blogs ✉️
🚂 Midnight Train - this rail startup in France is practicing radical transparency and you’ll love it if you’re a travel/transit nerd. There are many posts worth reading, but here’s one to start you off: a beginner’s guide to buying and designing trains.
✈️ The Airline Observer - If you’re interested in the airline industry, I can’t recommend this one enough. There’s a free tier, but the paid version is worth it.
🔢 Travel Analytica - Joe Slattery’s a longtime Holland America exec who is now consulting. His website is designed to promote his services, and he’s written a couple (somewhat technical) articles on revenue management, marketing, and “the great cruise ship bazaar” (the myriad ship sales that happened during the pandemic).
📝 Accident Reports 📝
These might seem grim, but you can learn so much from accident reports. The warts-and-all approach of an investigation means you find out how things actually work, and the reports themselves are part of a process of constant improvement. Two reports that came out last year…
🚢 Viking Polaris Drake Passage Report (via Rune Thomas) - In November 2022, the Viking Polaris cruise ship was south of Cape Horn in a fierce storm when a wave broke windows in several passenger cabins causing one death and several more injuries. The Norwegian NSIA found that the “design pressure requirements in the current regulations for windows were not sufficiently strong to withstand the force from some waves.” Check out the video and full PDF at the link above (and thanks RT for sending this to me!)
🚆 Amtrak Empire Builder derailment NTSB Report - In 2021, an Amtrak train derailed in Montana causing three deaths. The NTSB report found that the derailment was primarily caused by track issues. However, they found that injuries were exacerbated by design flaws of the railcars: 1) Some windows failed when train cars tipped over, causing some passengers to fall out of the train; 2) cars are not sufficiently “compartmentalized,” meaning passengers can be thrown around in the case of an “overturn event”.
Thank you for reading!
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