At Condé Nast Traveler 's Points of View Summit, Talk of Climate Change, Land Stewardship, and Taylor Swift
Sean Sime
Cherae Robinson of Tastemakers Africa hit on a recurring theme of Condé Nast Traveler’s Seventh Annual Points of View Summit when, during a panel discussion moderated by Erin Florio about shifting travel seasons, she said, “Destinations are more than our desire to reach them.” That “more” refers in part to the people that live there and make the place. During the day’s gathering of editors, travel specialists, and industry insiders, nothing was clearer or more resonant than the idea that travel’s purpose is to facilitate human connection. When done right, visiting a place allows the traveler to share space and time with people unlike themself, and any material or cultural exchanges that might occur serve to benefit both parties. Through the aforementioned discussion, as well as two more about traveling for food and entertainment, the human element came up again and again.
The day began with remarks from senior features editor Rebecca Misner celebrating the launch of Best Places to Go in 2025 and Bright Ideas in Travel and a prerecorded message from global editorial director Divia Thani, occupied with the first iteration of the summit in London, the conversation got started. After the summit, those in attendance gathered to celebrate the launch of the 2024 Readers' Choice Awards at the Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad. Read on for a recap of the proceedings.
The shifting travel season
In Edith Wharton’s America, all who were willing and able (of body and of bank account) could set off to Europe during the same summer months without concern for the space they were taking up. These privileged few could book their passage and accommodations, visit the sites, and dine out with little concern for crowds and the like—there simply weren’t that many people in competition to do what they were doing. Most couldn’t afford it. These days, a whole lot more people can. The explosive democratization of international travel this side of Y2K is not a bad thing, make no mistake—everybody should get to travel. But because the destinations themselves did not grow in tandem, what was once the once the travel season proper has become highly unpleasant, if not downright untenable, for many travelers. Even shoulder season, in places like Italy, no longer feels quite so mid-peak. In search of solutions, executive editor Erin Florio convened with travel expert and Places to Love host Samantha Brown, Hilton Head-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce President Bill Miles, Tastemakers Africa founder Cherae Robinson, and Vice President, Sustainability at Virtuoso Javier Arredondo.
To begin, there are the statistics. Florio used Greece—which welcomed a whopping 6.9 million international tourists in August of this year but only 2 million between November 2023 and April 2024—as an example of a destination that could stand to see off-season travel nurtured. Arredondo pointed out that another massive merit of extending the tourism season was to sustain jobs in the sector for longer periods of time. On Hilton Head Island, Miles notes that a long-term approach to fostering shoulder season travel has been successful thus far. As a beach destination, Hilton Head has long counted its peak season between Memorial and Labor Day. That’s unlikely to change, but by taking a resident-first approach to off-season programming—asking the locals what they want to see happen in the community and executing on that—with the faith that travelers will follow, the island has seen bookings up 10% in the month of October. The annual resident sentiment survey shows increased approval of local tourism on the island.
Brown, meanwhile, highlights that she’s observed the human element of travel—as simple as listening to a story told by that taverna owner or watching a craftsman work before buying one of their wares—become a luxury in the face of the overwhelming crowds. Enter another motivator for traveling in the off-season, when business owners aren’t stretched quite so thin by overtourism. “Connecting with people we feel we’re unlike,” she said, “in the age of social media, which is so fracturing. It’s when I travel that I realize that the world isn’t close to being over.”
Still, Arredondo flags that pushing travelers to the off-season in the major hubs alone will not be enough. Robinson, an expert in diverting travelers off the beaten path, cut her teeth presenting Africa’s urban areas as aspirational in the same way she’d seen done for places like Paris and Venice—showing rooftop dinner parties in Nairobi and chefs at work in Accra saw returns. “People think ‘off-the-beaten-path’ means ‘hiking,’ she said, “and hiking is great, but there are cities that don’t have the reputations they deserve yet.” Robinson adds that, ultimately, it’s up to the destinations themselves to determine what they are able to accommodate and what will benefit their populace—Botswana, for example, decided that when it comes to safari, it would be “luxury only, end of story. The travel has to better the country,” she said, not only the traveler. Managing traveler expectations and feelings of entitlement—you do, often, put a good deal of money and days off into these plans—is therefore essential. The unpredictability of a changing climate—astronomical temperatures on the Mediterranean in summer, extended monsoon season in Southeast Asia, the list goes on—only bolsters the reality that nothing is guaranteed in travel.
What food is in fashion?
In a sprawling discussion of global food trends led by global digital director Arati Menon, panelists Roni Mazumdar (co-founder of Unapologetic Foods, the group behind New York restaurants Semma and Masalawala & Sons), David Prior (co-founder and CEO of Prior), Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Jamila Robinson, and Crystal Vinisse Thomas (VP, Global Brand Leader, Lifestyle & Luxury Brands, Hyatt) touched on the trends they are seeing at the intersection of food and travel.
Menon began by noting food’s status as a living tradition, ever-evolving in the face of cultural and migratory shifts. It’s also, she notes, an excuse to sit with other people and share—break bread, tell stories, et cetera. Robinson established an early meeting of food and travel in the Michelin Guide, created by a tire company to encourage Americans to hit the road and see new cities and towns for the sake of food (and buying new tires.) Curiosity about local culture is easily sated, said Robinson, with food. Find out the way people in the place you’re visiting cook rice, for example, or bake bread, or mix a drink, and you’ve got an idea of how they live. In the diasporic world of today, “local” cuisine has massively diversified (when traveling to Houston, for example, you’d be wise to eat Vietnamese food), traditions and fusions are ever-evolving, and a homogenous, unchanging definition of fine dining works no longer. Said Mazumdar, “When we opened Semma, we had snails on the menu. Snails mattered because the chef spent his early life feeling ashamed of eating snails because it meant they were poor. And now you get to eat it and feel something. I can shave all the truffles for you and you might feel nothing in the end.” During audience questions, Wanda Redetti of VisitCroatia.com shared that, so long as we live in a multicultural society such as ours, you don't have to travel far—when she immigrated to Hell's Kitchen from Italy at age 10, she learned everything she knows about food within her family's apartment building. “There was Maria the Greek that made all the Greek food,” Redetti said, “and Maria the Sicilian making arancini.”
For Thomas, who works in part on dining concepts across Hyatt, the approach is pretty simple. “When you think about building your itinerary,” she said, “it’s often based on what reservations you can get. Remember when you wouldn’t be caught dead in a hotel restaurant?” Within Hyatt, Thomas said the aim has been to have restaurants so good that travelers want to book their stay there while also attracting locals with that same quality. Thomas considers Le Gratin an example of success for its integration into the scene, saying, “people don’t even know that’s part of The Beekman [a Thompson hotel]! And that’s okay!” Bringing in a local chef and team, rather than cooking a concept up in a lab and trying to make it fit into disparate locations, is the clear route to authenticity.
Prior, meanwhile, is seeing the concept of provenance, wherein ingredients are grown on the restaurant or hotel’s land, gain traction. There’s Heckfield Place in Hampshire, where ingredients from the onsite farm are fashioned into fresh, clean plates, but he also wagers that remote establishments currently operating only as restaurants adding a few rooms for guests who have traveled for a taste—Le Doyenné outside Paris, Stissing House outside New York City. Small properties that can focus on land stewardship, Menon observes, do so in remote regions that offer them greater control. Using the property in this way has the added benefit of providing an experience to curious guests who may want to engage with the process some step along the way—harvesting, a cooking class, you name it.
Are you not entertained?
If 2024 proved anything, it was that people will travel to be entertained. Many by Taylor Swift. The throngs of people and dollars that an entertainer or sporting event can draw to a destination made for a ripe discussion led by associate editor Matt Ortile between Tonia Constable (VP of Global Marketing Partnerships for Marriott International), Silke Wobken (Lufthansa Group’s Senior Director of Sales, USA East and Leisure), Molly Castano (Vice President of Public Relations and Communications, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority), and Claire Ballantine (finance reporter, Bloomberg).
Ballantine, who reported on the economic windfall Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour bestowed upon every city that it visited, said that the boom was possible because the American consumer was generally financially healthy in 2024. To summarize the trend, many concertgoers saw an opportunity to build a vacation around a Swift show in a destination with cheaper tickets, rather than spending all of that same money on a ticket in their own uber-expensive American city. Ballantine herself found that an $100 ticket to a concert in Lyon was reason enough for her to book a flight and a weeklong trip to France—let’s just say such stories are not rare. Castano saw Swift in Melbourne for $80. Constable, not a Swiftie, went to Edinburgh with two friends traveling to a concert there simply because she wanted to see Scotland, and on the night of the show did her own thing.
Swift’s tour was the splashiest example of something that many people did in different ways—to watch the Giants play in Munich, to catch a Formula One race, to see a show at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Ballantine predicts something similar to the Swift and Beyoncé effect could potentially happen on a smaller scale with the OASIS reunion tour next year. The consensus is that this type of travel functions as highly social community building, wherein tons of people with something in common descend on a destination and join with locals who also share that interest to experience something together.
Travel industry heavy-hitters like Lufthansa and Marriott are getting in on the action, too, aiming to meet increased demand in tandem with major events while also creating holistic experiences that get their travelers not only to an event but into the community in the days before and after. For those who want to avoid the crowds, Wobken recalled Lufthansa's push of flights to Hamburg as a German alternative during the chaos of Adele's residency in Munich. There's an answer for everyone.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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