No Show
No Show is about the business of travel: hotels, tourism, technology, changing consumer tastes, the conference industry, and what you actually get for $50 worth of resort fees.
Hosts Jeff Borman and Matt Brown explore the intersection of design, architecture, place, emotion, and memory. When we travel, we pass through these intersections, supported by a massive business infrastructure and a fleet of dedicated (and patient) service professionals.
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Travel Journalist Carley Thornell
On a stunningly regular basis, Pulitzer Prize winner Carley Thornell delivers insightful stories about sustainability, design, adventure, health, and travel. We talk space tourism, secret hotels, how people think about luxury, what Trump 2.0 means for tourism, the tax on families when they travel, and lots, lots more.
Hi everybody. It's no Show, I'm Matt. That's Jeff. We're always here hosting on a stunningly regular basis. Pulitzer Prize winner Carly Thornell delivers insightful stories to readers of Skiff, travel and Leisure, afar, the Rob Report, usa Today, business Insider, yahoo, the Boston Globe and many, many others. Her current beats include all things sustainability, design, adventure, health and travel, and the myriad ways those subjects connect with technology and business. She's been to 65-plus countries and islands. She's done zero-G astronaut training. As a features reporter at the Boston Herald, she flew weightless for seven minutes. She is a cultural chronicler, an advocate of veterans who've served our country, a connoisseur of libations, a bluey expert straight out of Boston. Welcome, carly Thornell.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for that rousing introduction. I hope I live up to the expectations here.
Speaker 1:You already are. You already are.
Speaker 3:So let's talk about astronauts. You've written about escapist retreats of all sorts, from tree houses to luxury resorts to space tourism. Space tourism is not a new idea, but it's actually happening and it draws rich guys and startups. Just thinking about all the places they could go that no one's ever been. Where is it going?
Speaker 2:So you know, if you look at I love to nerd out and kind of look at all things like travel Kegar. So this is one of those industries or sub industries where the growth rate is hovering around like 45% annually until about 2030. Having done the zero G training back in gosh maybe it was 2009 or so it was delightful, it was the easiest way to lose like 140 pounds I've ever, ever imagined. So, like you know, you said we or I flew waitlists for seven total minutes really on board with a few other like wannabe astronauts who could think of nothing better than escaping the confines of planet Earth. I will say it was a really interesting experience. It makes great fodder for cocktail parties, but, you know, I think that it really kind of just speaks to man's quest to perhaps be alone, especially maybe post-pandemic, and there are a decent number of maybe unique characters who don't really crave interaction with other human beings.
Speaker 2:So is it something I would spend $10,000 to do again? Not that I did in the first place, but these days, with inflation, it's about $8,900. No, is it a unique experience? Yes, just being a child during the Reagan administration, you have kind of always had that fantasy. And then with shows like For All Mankind on Apple TV. For those of you who haven't watched it, I highly recommend. You know it's a great way to nerd out. But is that what I want to put all of my money into? Not really.
Speaker 3:I love that you said people who crave solitude, or something similar, because my first thought here was, as I think, of the subject of space tourism Musk, Bezos, Branson. Is there a correlation between your description and the people who first come to mind in that space?
Speaker 2:So I'll say, confidence and ego there's always. You know, there's really no Wild West, so what's the only thing left? We have? The I don't want to say the great unknown, because we, you know, obviously know a whole lot about outer space. But you know, it's really the plays into that question around what is going to for some folks, one up the other. I think there's a really unique niche here where there are some people who are very, you know, scientific and they just want to learn everything there is to know, and then some other folks who kind of just perhaps want to feed their ego. Of course I don't know them personally, so maybe there's something else they want to share with the crowd. But I think one cool or interesting thing that's kind of an offshoot of this is there is a whole new growing sub-industry for ultra high net worth individuals, where there's a new company that just came on over from Spain and they are specializing in curating space tourism for folks who pull in at least a million dollars a year.
Speaker 1:You do a lot of family travel coverage and I wanted to ask if your lens on travel UX has changed dramatically after having a child. Ie kind of the challenges and taxes families pay as they try to go places and in fact you know when you think about those kinds of travel taxes and about travel UX. You've also written a great deal about seniors and kind of the UX around the life of seniors, how they try to kind of work through the world and technology in the world and also disabled veterans. You've kind of crafted a very distinct eye when it comes to how different people travel through the system differently. Has your own eye kind of in the middle of your own experiences? Has that made you even more aware than you already were?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. So I love all, as you've said, all things design and you know, I think that accessibility plays into that, you know, as a key component. So my father was a disabled veteran and you start to think about, you know, access issues in a way at a young age that you don't necessarily think of. Maybe most folks don't think of until they face those concerns. So where can I park? If I need to drive into Boston and go to a hospital with a very large wheelchair accessible van, the answer is you can actually valet park it at a nearby hotel. So thank you to the travel industry. But in terms of that question, I think you just start to see things a little differently and value hospitality even more so than you might have before. So with a child it's actually a lot easier, and that's why I have one, because you know he has two hands. There's two parents, we can just each take a hand.
Speaker 2:But maybe bathtubs that's one thing you know that a lot of hotels have done away with recently, especially during the pandemic. They were doing all these renovations and it takes a lot longer to clean a bathtub than it does a shower. So when they put some capital behind upgrading bathrooms, which a lot of people did with the reduced occupancy, they got rid of tubs. What does that mean? It means that you can't necessarily have a child there. So I tend to think or go through the world in terms of not what is inconvenience me or how do I travel, because I don't really have any handicaps but trying to see the world through other people's eyes. And that's a really valuable way to not only live life but to be a travel writer and have new experiences and see the world and still be inspired and engaged and kind of like amazed by the way that other people help up or step up to the plate to help you, even if it's not in a physical way and, you know, maybe it's just like cultural in terms of holding open a door.
Speaker 3:I'm glad to hear you recognize the operational cost of families. It's not something that I think most travelers really give much thought to. More occupants means more water, more towels, more electricity, more everything. The other part of it that I have only recently really learned much about myself is the investment side of creating a room that's meant for a family is significantly more. Also, you mentioned the bathtubs. It's about a third of the price of a bathroom to do a stand up shower. It's a you know. Here's real easy math. It's half price if you only put one instead of two beds.
Speaker 3:Right, Right, exactly, but you know, when you start easy math, it's half price if you only put one instead of two beds. Right, right, exactly. But you know, when you start doing those things as an investor, as an owner, building a hotel or renovating a hotel, those 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 per clip room differences to make it more family friendly, those add up very quickly when you're multiplying that by 100 rooms in a hotel or more Not something that usually gets a lot of coverage.
Speaker 2:I appreciate, oh, yeah, I'm just kind of a data nerd when it comes to that. I mean, if you um I've talked to a number of hoteliers about this but housekeeping, um, you know, for a room that has had children in it just think about the Cheerios on the floor you know what I mean so it's going to take the average housekeeper, you know, 20 minutes longer to up to 20 minutes to clean that room, versus another one for a business traveler who's really not in the room very much at all. So just the data is in the details for sure.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to shift a bit here as a travel business writer really any kind of writer right now consumed by what does Trump 2.0 mean? What do you think the new administration's potential impact on tourism will be?
Speaker 2:I love this question because I think that there are two very, very divergent paths here. Here, number one I think we're going to see, like we did, you know, immediately after COVID, a resurgence in patriotic travel, and what I mean by that is, you know, to our national parks. You know maybe less of a desire among certain travelers to spend money overseas and the inclination to discover more of the United States. We do have a big country, a broad country, with lots of great experiences to be had, and there's been a lot of development, actually, when it comes to direct flights and new airlift to certain cool destinations or destinations we might not have necessarily considered cool even 10 years ago. I'm thinking of, like Delta has the new hub in Salt Lake City, which is a pretty cool thing.
Speaker 2:And then, in terms of the other way I think this is going to go you know, I'm a member of a lot of groups for, like, female travelers, and you know, I do think that we're really going to see the power of the purse here. I think there are going to be a lot of people who put their money or invest their time off, because it's not only a monetary investment, it's a time investment. Where do I want to explore where I feel welcomed and valued. So already I've seen a lot of folks on Girls Love Travel. It's a very popular site for female, especially solo travelers to go.
Speaker 2:We've seen a huge resurgence in Boston, even in February, you know, one of the coldest months here. People want to go to some place. Arguably, I would you know say is maybe more liberal than some other destinations. And then you know there's really no lack of folks in America spending money on travel overseas, so I don't think that's going to die off either. Americans spend more money on tourism than most other countries which we have less vacation time, so you tend to spend a little bit more at one point in time.
Speaker 3:I hope you're right that in the way that it means more domestic spend of travel dollars by Americans. I hope so because, first of all, foreign exchange rates are still not going to be in favor of that for a while. Right, it's still cheaper to take our dollars overseas right now, probably will be through 25, maybe through 26. But as long as traveling overseas is at a discount, americans will probably continue to do so.
Speaker 3:My bigger concern with the whole subject is that America first is not a very welcoming marketing slogan to the rest of the world. As much as we spend, we are in a trade deficit of biblical proportions. Right, what we send overseas to what people bring here. If you compare it back to 19, the very end of Trump 1.0, it's a $50 billion delta. Right, we are taking our money overseas and people are not coming back nearly in a proportionate manner. That really, for our domestic travel industry, needs to change and even if some of the actions that the administration is going to move forward with, the message overseas is we don't want you, and I think that's really terrible for the domestic business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree with that. You know, I have been really blessed in so many ways to have made friends in many different countries who come from different cultures and backgrounds. I think they do realize that America is a diverse place when it comes to perspective and many other things, but I will say that a lot of those folks do come from countries where the economy isn't as strong as ours, and so for them to come here it's really often a once in a lifetime experience that they potentially will put off at least for the next four years, if not more.
Speaker 3:Just recently, the Star Spangled Banner was booed at an NBA game in Canada. It may have happened at an NHL game as well, and it's absolutely unnecessary in my mind to create ill will with our neighbors. You know why make ourselves hated. We can achieve these same goals without fostering hatred on on our longest border, or anywhere for that matter and, yeah, anywhere.
Speaker 2:I mean there having been 65 or so countries and whatnot. Um, you know, I this goes back several years, but, um, I thought I had lost something like a travel document in a country where I don't speak Spanish, unfortunately. I wish I did. But the kindness that was shown to me, for people, or by people who didn't even know me just on the street, really stuck with me. I remember their expressions, them trying to help, and that exists everywhere. It exists here as well. So, for anyone who's listening, I try to believe in the good because of what I've been able to experience, and that's not necessarily like your high-end hotel. It's the people that you meet, the food you eat, the connections that you make, no doubt, and it's the dollars they you meet, the food you eat, the connections that you make, no doubt, and it's the dollars they bring.
Speaker 3:Canada was the top source of international visits to the US last year with 20 million visits, and a lot of that was commercial traffic right Trucking, shipping, day trips, stuff like that. But a 10% reduction in Canadian travel would be 2 million fewer visits, 2 billion lost in spending, 14,000 job losses. These are from US Travel Association. It adds up really quickly and I sure hope that whatever ill will we're creating doesn't last.
Speaker 2:Agreed A thousand percent. When I was a kid we didn't have, you know, too many resources but we used to summer and at a beach in New Hampshire and there were a lot of Canadian tourists and you know I always remember connecting with them and I know someone at the beginning of this podcast mentioned Bluey. There is a lovely episode called camping, where they do not speak the same language but when you talk about travel, adventure, family, at the end they do speak the same language and they make that connection. So hopefully the next four years aren't quite as long as we might think they are.
Speaker 1:Carly, you wrote something recently for the Rob Report about secret luxury hotels existing inside properties that are already there. It's like there was a hotel and now there's another hotel inside of it. But after I read it I was you know my first thought was part of this is clever marketing using existing properties. But then again, the entire world of travel is about levels and sub-brands and rooms behind other rooms. What do you think of this trend and do you think we're going to start seeing more and more of it across not just hotels but all of travel?
Speaker 2:I don't anticipate seeing this. No, I think it works, for maybe like your three and your four-star together, maybe like your three and your four star together. And you know, there are a few properties from some of the bigger brands, like Marriott, where they've been able to capitalize on their existing footprint by building like three separate brands with separate hotel towers, you know, next to each other and that works fine for like overflow and whatnot. Maybe in a place like Vegas it works okay. You know I have stayed at Steve Wynn's place, the Wynn Hotel here in Boston. It's called Encore and that was kind of a strange experience.
Speaker 2:I'm not really a big fan of literally looking down on people who don't have the same color towel as me. Some people are kind of into that thing. But I think that if you're, you know, going to stay at a five-star hotel, you just want to stay at a five-star hotel. You just want to stay at a five-star hotel. You don't want to mingle with other folks who might be there sure, let's the riffraff, shall we say it's just a five-star experience should be a bad experience.
Speaker 1:It's just yes, exactly it. There's also just a like. There's a whiff of severance to it, right.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's this one property, but then we have this one part of it, that we're all part of the same thing, but there's one part that's living a completely different existence than the other. It's like whoa, that's freaky. We have yet to see the Ritz-Carlton Courtyard share platform Totally no-transcript that. But let's think about it for a second here. I mean I can't think of like, especially with airlines. I can't think of a more stratified kind of unbundled experience than going through the airline purchasing routine. So I don't think it's so far-fetched.
Speaker 3:In the back of the plane, the emergency masks. They only have two per row of three. In the back of the plane.
Speaker 1:the emergency masks, they only have two per row of three. See, it's easy Once you go down this road.
Speaker 3:I'm in asset management. Now I can value engineer anything.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I don't know if you guys saw this is going back a ways, but I covered the first flight out of the direct flight out of Boston on Emirates and that was for a press thing and I was supposed to be put in first class and they, I got to the airport and that was so not the case. So I ended up being in steerage and gosh, what a different experience. So they gave me this tour of first class and like okay, so this is what you're not doing. And then here you are in a row of five with a broken seat for 14 hours, like well, you know what I just got? The story that no other journalist has.
Speaker 1:Mm, hmm, you know, the safeguard against this is, you know, Jeff, as you and I were talking about with the report. I think you mentioned that there's an economics component to this too.
Speaker 3:right, One hotel you get the value of two hotels with the efficiencies of a single hotel. You only need one back of house right. You get the value of two hotels with the efficiencies of a single hotel. You only need one back of house right, one employee locker room, one employee cafeteria, one large utilities room that can service the whole building. You know the heat doesn't need to be different for a luxury hotel or an economy hotel. You still got to have heat, fewer permits to the building, greater cross-discipline efficiency. There's a million things you can do. So I mean, in some ways these are brilliant models. I think in part the ones that I've seen most successfully run. They feel very different. Though you don't walk into a lobby and choose this elevator for the luxury side and this elevator for the convention, you enter in a different place. You have a different experience on the luxury side of the building altogether. It just happens to be going to a few floors.
Speaker 3:You also have so much mixed use and residential mixed into hotel complexes anymore that it's very simple to think that floors 10 through 30 are the hotel, 30 to 50 are luxury condos. I think that's so normal too Right, that squeezing in a little different kind of hotel in the middle is probably not that hard or different for anybody to operate under.
Speaker 2:I think you really need to have some specific features or upsells or advantages to do that and have it make sense for that five-star consumer. But yes, on the operations side you have your training ground. You have all these shared efficiencies and for certain properties that have this really prime real estate that's like ocean-facing, and you're kind of maxed out on where you can build. I mean, why not? As long as you just build it on top, you can just keep going higher. And why not? As long as you just build it on top, you can just keep going higher and higher.
Speaker 1:It's time for the lightning round.
Speaker 2:Yay.
Speaker 1:Wellness is huge for hotels and travel brands. Duh, of course. So everybody's talking about it, everybody wants a piece of it, everybody wants to sell it to their consumers. What do you think is next on the horizon for really any travel provider as far as wellness goes?
Speaker 2:Oh sure, I love this. So what I'm seeing a lot of is this focus on sleep. And you know I get a bunch of releases and I'm lucky enough to get to go to some properties, but some of the properties are designed with sleep in mind, and not only when it comes to these. You know, like double panel walls with great sheetrock and the blackout shades, but we're talking the whole like soup to nuts experience, you know, with aromatherapy and whatnot and soothing sounds and these really wonderful high end mattresses. You know that are handmade in Connecticut and you know they're not imported from overseas and whatnot. But I think that sleep tourism is definitely one we're going to see continue trending.
Speaker 2:I actually have been reading about I think it's called divorce, sleep, and this is one thing that I love.
Speaker 2:This is my favorite takeaway from going to Scandinavia.
Speaker 2:Not sure if you've ever been, but what they do is they have two sets of, instead of having a big king comforter, they have two twins that they put side by side and everyone gets to have their own little piece of the blanket, and that's how they have prevented, you know, high divorce rates for decades.
Speaker 2:So it's about time we kind of got on that bandwagon. You know, at one point you and I had talked a little bit about a rise in elopement tourism and I do think that's another thing that we might see, because now that I have probably just revealed my age to you telling you I grew up during the Reagan administration you know, a lot of the younger folks who are getting engaged now are looking at $100,000 weddings and, yes, I live in Boston, so that's probably higher than you know. You're going right in Nebraska but a lot of them are talking about just eloping and not even having you know that destination wedding, but just going on a great trip with just each other, having a couple of random witnesses wherever they end up and, um, having a party when they get home.
Speaker 1:A couple more here for you. What's the most Massachusetts thing about you? You were Massachusetts born and raised, is that correct? Yes A plenty New Englander.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I'm pretty thrifty, um, and I love clipping coupons on and no, micro market basket doesn't have an app. Um, so I love market basket. That is a local um grocer here and they have this hot like die hard following and it most people across the country will know about people of walmart. It's like a feed on on facebook, but there's also one called people of Market Basket. That's pretty Massachusetts of me. I don't think I have an accent, but my son, you know who's younger, definitely doesn't no clue where this came from. And it's so cute to hear a little kid, you know, when he says Wicked for the first time, you're like wow, where did you pick that up?
Speaker 3:Is Treehouse, the greatest brewery on the East Coast?
Speaker 2:you pick that up, is treehouse the greatest brewery on the east coast? What a great question. Um, sadly, I haven't been to treehouse um yes is the answer yes, okay, yes, I'll take your word for it.
Speaker 3:Put it on I think we answered what is the least massachusetts thing about you now?
Speaker 2:I don't like duncan donuts the donuts are bad. The coffee yeah, it's overrated, I don't like.
Speaker 1:Dunkin' Donuts. The donuts are bad. The coffee yeah, it's overrated, I don't get it.
Speaker 2:Can we also talk about the quote unquote rebrand, which is the biggest waste of millions of dollars that I've ever seen?
Speaker 1:Where they just simply go to Dunkin'.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, fair Well.
Speaker 2:Dunkin's going for a more health conscious future. You know Sure Well.
Speaker 1:Duncan's going for a more health conscious future, you know.
Speaker 2:Sure what I think when I walk in Sure.
Speaker 1:Me too. What would you say is the most interesting luxury experience you've had in recent memory? Maybe it doesn't have to necessarily be the best or the worst, but what was something that was kind of unexpected.
Speaker 2:Okay, so one of my most memorable is a place called Puyawapi and it's a resort that's at seemingly the end of the earth in Patagonia, in Chile, and I was very excited to go there because they don't have well, they have Wi-Fi, sparingly, at a shared terminal, and you have to take a flight to the middle of nowhere and then you get into a rented car and you travel for four hours and then you get on a speedboat to get to this hotel and it feels legit like you're going to the Batcave and it's gorgeous. There are mountain peaks, there's little streams and you know they raise salmon there and it's super quiet and I was pretty pumped to. You know, just get away from it all. And then I went to the shared terminal because who can not check their email for a day, as previously discussed, and I'm like you know this would be a great in my mind, like this would be a great place for the most famous person on earth to escape to, and that person at the time was Tom Brady.
Speaker 2:And so I go to this shared terminal and I go to check my email and I, for some reason, I went to the search bar and the last search thing was Tom Brady, I'm like this guy can't escape. He really can't, even at the ends of the earth. You know, people in South America know him because of who he was married to at the time and you know it's really cool to be able to, in my opinion, travel anonymously, live your best life and really not have people watching you. In case you have, maybe that second glass of wine.
Speaker 1:Great advice, Carly. Thank you so much for being on no Show. We'd love to have you again sometime.
Speaker 2:Thanks, I appreciate the time.
Speaker 1:And we'll talk to you soon.