A few years ago I got an email from a hotel two days before check-in. Subject line: "Enhance your stay." Inside was an invitation to bid on a room upgrade — a junior suite for a price I'd name myself, somewhere between…
Most people think hotel upgrades are random. They're not. There's a system behind them, and once you understand how it works, you stop feeling like you're waiting for luck to go your way and start making decisions that…
Barcelona is an expensive city by Spanish standards, and it's gotten more expensive in recent years as the tourism economy has pushed prices up across accommodation, food, and the major attractions. The Sagrada Família…
Istanbul is one of those cities where where you stay shapes what version of the city you experience — more so than in most places, because the city is enormous, spread across two continents, and so layered with different…
Currency exchange is one of those travel topics where the difference between doing it well and doing it badly is measured in real money — sometimes a lot of it. A two-week trip to Southeast Asia where you exchange your…
I went to Dubrovnik expecting to be disappointed. That's not how I usually travel — I try to arrive somewhere open rather than braced — but I'd read enough "Dubrovnik is ruined by tourists" pieces and enough "Dubrovnik…
The Algarve is the kind of place that requires no justification. You go because of the beaches, and the beaches deliver so thoroughly that most visitors spend their first day slightly stunned, wondering why they waited…
I nearly didn't go to Morocco. I'd read enough contradictory accounts online — "it's magical," "it's exhausting," "the medinas are overwhelming," "the people are incredibly kind," "the touts won't leave you alone" — that…
Amsterdam is one of those cities that works at almost any pace, but it especially rewards the long weekend. Not rushed enough to feel like you're checking boxes, not so long that you run out of things to discover. Three…
The first travel credit card I got, I picked for the wrong reasons. It had a good sign-up bonus, I applied, got approved, and spent about six months trying to figure out why the rewards I was earning weren't turning into…
The first free walking tour I took was in Berlin, about eight years ago. I was skeptical going in — I'd assumed "free" meant low-effort, forgettable, a box-checking exercise for people who didn't know how else to start a…
The first time I traveled solo in Europe, I spent the week before departure reading every "safety tips for women" article I could find and came away more anxious than when I started. Most of the advice was either so…
This is the question I get asked more than almost any other when someone tells me they're heading to Indonesia for the first time. And I understand why — from the outside, Bali and Lombok look similar enough to be…
I've used both platforms for years and the honest answer to which is better is: it depends, and the factors it depends on are specific enough to be actually useful rather than a cop-out. Most comparison articles on this…
Two weeks a year. That's what a lot of people are working with — either because their job offers limited paid leave, because life circumstances make longer absences impossible, or because they're not yet in a position to…
A few years ago a friend of mine spent three weeks in a farmhouse in Tuscany, looking after two dogs and a vegetable garden, paying nothing for accommodation. The year before that she'd done the same thing in a flat in…
