Maria Shollenbarger on why destinations trend, and the future of travel

Show Notes

We’re continuing my conversation with luxury travel journalist and editor Maria Shollenbarger. Today, we’re delving into the travel industry—how and why certain destinations trend over others, how preferences have changed since COVID, and the future of travel in the age of AI. In case you missed Part 1 of our conversation, you can watch it here: I’ll be back next week with a new Encore episode with all-round rockstar Bobby Chinn.

This episode is brought to you by:⁠

• EFG Hermes One⁠, your one app for investing in more than 35 stock markets worldwide⁠. Start Investing today: https://app.efghermesone.com/
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Chapters

0:00 Coming up...

2:30 Travel in a post-COVID world

5:56 The Impact of Social Media

7:22 The role of Airbnb

9:03 Life as a Travel Journalist

11:47 The evolution of luxury travel

16:37 Travel in the age of AI

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This episode is brought to you by:

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Creators and Guests

Host

Malak Fouad

Founder, A&T Media and Host, What I Did Next

What is WIDN with Malak Fouad?

Connecting the dots across the Middle East through storytelling. Join host Malak Fouad, as she brings you the most inspiring people and unpacks their life journeys — successes, failures and everything in between!

Travel, again, thanks to social media, achieved, like, took on the contours

of a commodity. Yes. Go here, get this photo. Go here, have this drink.

I've always been curious about the machinations behind this particular industry.

I think because the travel industry understands that authenticity is a word

that is, like, long past its sell-by date, they're trying to figure out what

the next version of that is and what the rhetoric around that needs to be.

You can just get on ChatGPT or book your flight and then book your own tours

if you want to do a tour. I mean, it is doable.

It's 100% doable.

This episode is brought to you by EFG Hermes One, your one app for investing

in more than 35 stock markets worldwide.

This episode is also brought to you by Azza Fahmy Jewelry.

Welcome again to What I Did Next from A&T Media. I'm Malak Fouad.

We're continuing my conversation with travel journalist and editor Maria Shollenbarger.

Today we're talking about how travel preferences have changed since COVID and

how certain destinations start trending and why and the future of travel in the age of AI.

As someone who used to be kind of peripheral a little bit in your world and,

you know, just observing travel, you know, as a consumer, there are trends in travel.

Like there are trends in fashion. You know, you look at Condé Nast Traveler

and they have the top 10 destinations of 2025, let's say.

Who decides on that? How does that become a thing?

Oh, that's a big question. Only because with, you know, when I started,

it was the mid 2000s, which is 20 years ago now.

Let's not say that.

Sorry. For us. Well before the advent of social media, certainly before social

media had saturated every aspect of our lives.

And that that was a paradigm shift in who decides what in travel. That's right.

As you know, well, as the whole world knows, I think a lot of it is just editors

sitting down, talking about looking, looking at research, looking at what they've

heard, looking at what they've seen, looking at what's being sent to them,

looking at who's opening where.

What I think, what I'm wondering is how much of it is, as you said,

based on research and data and how much of it is hype?

Like, for example, let's say that last year's trend, I mean,

right now, Japan is seriously hot.

And this year is probably the biggest tourism year for Japan.

How did that suddenly, how did that momentum happen?

So we just did our travel issue and we talked about the oversaturation of certain markets.

And New York Magazine did a very funny travel issue that was almost entirely

dedicated to this, you know, like travel panic, what's going on in the world.

And I quoted New York Magazine in my story with a quote about,

first of all, it was the dollar, the extremely favorable U.S.

dollar exchange. Made it very easy for Americans to go there at a time when

there was a war in Gaza, which Americans freak out, you know,

the minute something happens, they're canceling left and right.

I'm sure numbers on the river here were down. They were.

But it can be as simple as that. As you said, a geopolitical crisis somewhere

makes people migrate somewhere else.

Exactly. And like, for instance, during COVID, there were some really,

really brilliant issues of all the U.S.

magazines rediscovering U.S. destinations.

That's right. I'd be like, okay, Santee Inez Valley in California,

which is north of Santa Barbara, between Santa Barbara and kind of where the Big Sur coast starts.

Your old...

My stomping ground. Your home ground. My Katie ground. That had a huge...

It got a huge amount of play during COVID and in the ensuing years until now

because people who normally would have gone to Sicily or Tuscany or Mendoza

or wherever it is that they go for their wine country had to stay in California.

So that, you know, Napa's too expensive, Sonoma's quite saturated, let's explore this

more southerly destination which actually has

and interestingly Jancis Robinson who's the wine critic at

the FT just her Sunday column last week

was about this emerging wine destination and there's

some really interesting restaurants that have opened up auberge resorts which

is a big American company just opened a very sweet hotel there I think it was

last year or the year before so it can just be a critical mass of these things

yeah it can be a critical mass of things some of which are hyper championed

by a really savvy PR. That's right. With a lot of money. It's a

confluence of things. It's a confluence of things.

Exactly.

So post-COVID, we know that the travel world kind of ignited, right?

I mean, I think the lockdown made everyone realize there's more to life than material things.

And luxury, I think for a lot of people, became about experiences.

People were willing to put money into trips, into experiences,

going off the grid, doing really, really creative and unusual things.

And importantly, that is a trend that I felt already had legs in,

for lack of a better term, the West, in Europe and the UK and very,

very wealthy Americans.

Before COVID, you felt it?

Before COVID. That was starting sort of, we were covering a lot of that kind

of thing. I see. Multi-generational travel, cruises.

But that would have been at the higher end.

At the higher end also.

But I think the concept began to trickle down to a more like democratic demographic.

Yes, exactly. And all through, yes, it did.

It became more accessible.

It did.

And more aspirational.

Accessible and aspirational. And then, again, cost-effective,

a lot more cost-friendly after COVID because destinations that were suffering terribly.

Yeah. I mean, there was an explosion of over-tourism. For sure.

Revenge tourism, which became in many destinations over-tourism. And...

a bit, unfortunately to my mind, travel, again, thanks to social media,

achieved, like took on the contours of a commodity.

Yes. Go here, get this photo. Go here, have this drink. Must have this, you know.

Yeah. I heard a story, you know, you hear stories about people kind of having

an absolute meltdown if the specific flavor they wanted to put on their feed,

which isn't really a world that I operate in professionally.

That's what I do at the magazine is a completely different world.

But living half of my time in Florence, Italy...

It's inescapable. I mean, places that I can get a table at in the middle of

January as a walk-in become completely inaccessible to me.

But a lot of cities are now shutting the doors, right? And taxing tourists to come in. Venice, I mean.

And regulating. There's, I mean, I heard, this is completely conjecture I heard socially.

But my understanding is that Rome is going to start cracking down on Airbnbs

quite significantly. A lot of cities are doing that. Florence has retroactively made it.

You can't put, there are no new properties allowed on. and they have to be longer-term rent.

I think that's right.

Yeah.

Because it's not fair on the residents.

It's really, there are cities where it's obviously completely gutted.

And Lisbon is a sad, sad disaster.

That's right.

But I think it's also, not that I'm a huge fan necessarily, but I think it's

also important to acknowledge how Airbnb in its early years made travel accessible to people in a way.

And it really, it did deliver on the live like a local because you were staying

in a home, which meant you had to go to the local market.

It too became a monster in that way.

But it allowed people to stay longer as well. So they got to know those cities better.

Yes, which is a good way to travel.

When we come back after the break, Maria tells me about the future of travel

agents in the age of ChatGPT, when itineraries can be prepared in the blink of an eye.

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Welcome back. You're listening to part two of my conversation with Maria Shollenbarger.

So tell me, I mean, I know because you and I have spoken a lot,

Your day-to-day life is really hectic. It is really hectic.

It is really hectic. It doesn't feel to me like you have control over your time.

Well, I do. My day-to-day life is...

The one thing I will say is that the initial feedback from a lot of people is,

God, you have the jammiest job on the planet.

And I sort of think, you didn't see me eating that warmed up half a burrito

last night at 11:30 while I'm meeting a deadline, you know, or I am on the road a lot. Yes.

So what I commission in my role, I commission and edit the travel content of

HTSI, which is online and obviously in print.

And what is your team? How many people do you have within that?

I have no team. It is me.

But I thought you assigned some journalists to some...

So we have a stable of contributing editors, some of whom kind of specialize

in travel, but I'll work with all of them if they bring me a great pitch.

And additionally, people from all over pitch. One of the things I have found

that takes up more of my time than it ever did before is just managing the inbox

because people pitch from all over the place.

You know, there's a lot of cachet to all sections of the magazine.

People obviously want to write fashion. They want to write about jewelry.

But it has been my 16-going-on-17-year experience that the thing most people

really want to do is write travel because you get sent on quite extraordinary trips.

We get a lot of cold pitches, all of which need to be read because in and amongst,

just the bullshit one, excuse my language, sometimes there's somebody with a really brilliant idea.

There's a gem in there.

Yeah, or somebody you're like, gosh, this person looks really interesting.

They don't have the widest CV I've ever seen, but they wrote a really beautiful

pitch and let's just give them the chance.

And that's a lot of my time. I write a column two times a month,

which is a news column called Trabalista.

And is there a specific theme to the column?

It is news. It's meant to be kind of news. And now, quite specifically,

it's been more themed than it used to be.

It used to just read as like a written through news column of two pages.

Now it's kind of, there might be a theme of like off-piste villages and where's

the nicest place to stay, walking trips. Nice.

Or just a new kind of hotel.

And tell me, like, give me an idea of what a month is like. Is there...

For example, are you on the road two weeks a month?

Is there like a fixed amount of time that you choose not to be traveling?

That is where my time is not necessarily my own to manage.

Not all the time, but there are times of the year. Like I was explaining before

we went on camera, September to Christmas is silly season.

I mean, it's just not least because of these conferences. There was one in Poula.

There's one in Cannes in France at the beginning of December.

I'm here a lot right now for personal and work reasons. I would say,

yeah, I'm on the road one week to two weeks a month.

But very often, I try to go up to London every five or six weeks to check in

in the office, cross over with my editors, talk about ideas.

Yeah, and presumably that's a good opportunity to look ahead.

It's a very good opportunity to look ahead. And sometimes we're doing stories

that will run next fall right now.

Oh, that far ahead. Sometimes, you know, we just pulled together another story

about the Galapagos that literally came together in three weeks.

Gave us all a few white hairs, but it's a beautiful story, so it's worth it.

Because you don't actually think of travel as being current and needing to rush and get a story out.

Only if it involves an exclusive on a hotel property or something really interesting

happening in a destination.

Is that common?

If you have a big name hotel like a, let's pretend..

A chain of some kind.

Let's pretend that Claridge is closed down. Well, as it did a few years ago,

they added all the subterranean floors and everything.

It was kind of a big bidding war for that story amongst certainly UK titles.

and then they're trying to schedule a media plan because they wanted to come

out with a big splash but they're trying to schedule a media plan as well.

So you're negotiating around that and we probably have three or four of those stories a year.

What do you do in terms of photography when you're traveling?

Do you have someone when you travel with you or how does that work?

Or do the hotels provide you with...

For smaller stories, one of the seminal changes to the magazine since Joe has

come on as its editor, which is 1 million percent to the good,

is that we've started really budgeting for photographers for travel features.

We used to rely on visuals provided, pick up imagery, by the hotel or by a destination

or a Getty. Or stock imagery or whatever.

Stock images, which sometimes really undersold a story.

You know, we'd have somebody really, like a Lucia of Underpost or someone who

used to write these incredible pieces and then the imagery was a bit meh. Yeah.

Or that it's imagery that other people can have as well.

Exactly. That had run before or that was just not...

not part of the visual identity. We have a really distinct visual identity now.

Yes, you do. And distinctive also.

And so I sometimes travel with photographers. There's a guy called Stefan Gifthaler, who's Milanese.

And he and I have been on some very fun jobs together. We like to sort of,

I mean, nobody else does. We call ourselves the A-team. It just makes us feel good.

It's fun. He's wonderful because he shoots.

And which one of you is Mr. T?

That's the question. I let him be Mr. T.

He's Mr.

T. Okay, okay. I'm the guy, the handy guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So sometimes I'm handed somebody, and that usually is, I've never had that workout

badly when I'm with someone.

I've traveled. I traveled all over Italy with Stefan. I've traveled to Namibia

with a great guy based in New York called Adrian Goh.

I had the time of my life, I think. It was his first time in Africa.

Wow. So that was quite nice. That's always special. Yes.

I want to ask you, and this is actually, I'll just pause and explain about why

I'm going to ask this question.

Because, you know, the show's theme is always about people's pivot points.

And we've been running now for five years.

And I realized that we'd look back a lot.

And I wanted to start thinking slightly differently about my theme of the show.

So I'm going to start. You're the first episode, by the way, of the year.

Of 2026. So you're my guinea pig.

Okay.

For this question. So I'm basically asking people to look forward.

And I want you to look forward to what you think is going to be happening in the industry as a whole.

You know, AI has taken over everyone's consciousness and thinking.

And is there something about AI that worries you about for the travel industry?

Is there something that's on the radar coming up that, you know,

you're noticing a change that's going to be challenging for the industry?

Is there something positive that's going to be happening in the next year, two years, three years?

That's kind of making you begin to think about what's coming next.

It's interesting that you ask this question because driving back from Siwa with

two friends, you know, seven, eight hours in the car, we discussed this.

And I think there's going to be a real kind of bifurcation of people's ideas,

demographics, ideas of what luxury travel is.

Because what I know is that I find it deeply depressing when I walk into a hotel

that has like a boilerplate design, a super famous designer who nonetheless

has been working in Dubai and Sydney and Sao Paulo and Los Angeles.

They have a standard style.

And the astronomical fees for these places and big name restaurants moving in. These feel like...

It's like the Hilton and the Marriott of today. Like that sort of the standardization of it all.

Exactly. And it's a very, very rarefied form of standardization.

but it's more broadly, it's a lens on luxury that I don't think is..

reflects how a certain kind of person feels about luxury anymore,

most principally in its attachment to what things cost.

I think it's really disgusting to pay 3,300 euros a night for a hotel room. I agree.

But I wonder, Maria, if that is just the bigger chains catching up late to what

they think the modern luxury traveler wants.

I think there are different iterations of the modern existing,

you know, contemporaneously, but there's, contemporarily, excuse me,

there are markets that want that.

There are emerging markets that very much find that that's, you know,

people who have more money than I'll ever have, but for whom we're writing sometimes at the magazine.

And there are certain places where that doesn't, if I'm in Bangkok,

for sure I want to stay at the Oriental because it's a beauty,

well, that's also a hotel with heritage and character. With a lot of heritage,

yeah. That's a bad example.

A stunning hotel. But failing that, I would stay at the Four Seasons because

I'm sure it's very beautiful. I've never been, but it also represents a level

of comfort in a city that can be a bit of a challenge with traffic,

that can be a bit of a challenge with heat and humidity, things like this.

The cacophony of a big city like this.

And sometimes you want that sure bet. Yeah, totally. You do.

But you don't always want it. No. And even that sure bet is trying to tell stories.

I think because the travel industry understands that authenticity is a word

that is long past its sell-by date, they're trying to figure out what the next

version of that is and what the rhetoric around that needs to be.

You have to be incredibly clever about how you do that because people see through it.

You know, the kind of people you want going to these hotels,

they see through it in a second.

And there's ideas about slowness that are still really valid.

That was a big buzzword six, seven years ago.

Snow travel. Where you spend time and just take your time to get to know where

you are. Is that what you mean by that?

In the broader luxury travel sphere right now, boats and trains.

I mean, trains, you know, Paolo Barletta, who started La Dolce Vita,

that amazing new train in Italy,

has just launched in Saudi Arabia a train called Dream of the Desert.

I heard about that.

And he is in the process of building one for this country. Yes,

I heard about that too. It's going to go from Alexandria all the way to Aswan.

And the sort of the inspiration is the Orient Express, right?

Yes, the company is in fact Orient Express. And everything is meant to sort of refer back.

Dream of the Desert, no. Dream of the Desert is not Orient Express.

La Dolce Vita is actually part of the Orient Express portfolio.

I don't think the Egypt train will be, from what I understand.

But the idea of that luxury train experience.

Absolutely. I mean, it lends itself really perfectly to this new permutation,

this evolution of what luxury travel is, such as that is, because it is slow,

it's sustainable, it's electric most of the time. Yeah. Yeah.

is meant to tap into culture. You know, the Venice Semplon Orient Express is all about the train.

It's a 36-hour ride. You go, you trundle from Paris through the Alps down to

Venice. You have this quite sexy, slightly louche, if it goes well,

experience on the train, you know. Well, everyone thinks... Last drink at two

in the morning in the bar singing.

Well, I also think that there's that whole Agatha Christie feel about it.

Right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Someone's going to get murdered on the train, you know. Hopefully not.

Yeah, I mean, I hope you at least get your money back. Well,

you have a good meal first. Exactly.

But a lot of the other trains, like La Dolce Vita, is built as much around the

experiences that you have when you get off the train.

You go, I went on one of the maiden voyages.

Yeah, I think you did that right before we met.

I did. I wrote it for the paper, actually, not for HTSI, but for the pink pages of the paper.

Yes. And, you know, we were taken in, we had a private tour of the archives,

the state archives in Siena.

So we were looking at book covers that have been painted 800 years ago.

I mean, it was quite special into rooms that aren't normally open to the public.

And then you're shepherded back to the train down the hill and you get on.

And Heinz Beck, who is the most Michelin starred chef in Italy,

you know, found he's there's some sort of culinary order that he founded.

He's done all the food. And the galley on the train is like that big.

Yeah, I mean, it's tiny, tiny. So it's pretty amazing when you get on and you're

sort of, as you go between Venice and Siena, let's say, you're eating food that's

typical of Emilio Romagna because that's where you're going through. It's amazing.

It's so well thought out. It is. And it's so refined in its approach.

And it taps all of the sort of luxury travel touch points of today. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What are those touch points?

I think still slow. I think if you...

are traveling, if you're a person of any means in education,

if you're traveling without thinking about sustainability in some form or capacity

as it relates to your travel, you're just not doing the right.

That has to be part of the remit. That has to be part of the remit.

Which is why I think it makes sense, and always will think it makes sense,

to work with a really good travel designer.

A lot of high net worth people that we write to and for at the magazine have

travel designers with whom they've worked.

They call them travel designers?

They call themselves that, but they're also called that travel agents.

Yeah, but very bespoke and know the family or know the couple.

They know what they want.

Over the course of generations, they've worked, you know, and that's not uncommon.

I mean, family offices have these people on the retainer, but also just families.

My friend Emily Fitzroy, who has a company called Bellini Travel,

she's the Naples Ultra of Italy.

You know, if I had a friend who wanted to do anything, I would always send them

to her. Interesting. Because she understands the high. She understands the low.

She understands that travel in Italy at its best is a combination of those two things.

She has incredible access, basically literally unfettered access,

but also knows to just take you into Barcalisto in Rome and get you the special,

you know, Marrochino that they do.

It's that kind of thing that you would never know.

All the TikTok scrolling in the world is not good because you're not editing.

You can't edit and they do. Sure, sure.

It's curation, which is a terribly overused word, but it's true.

It's true, it's true. That's fascinating, Maria.

I mean, I've always been curious about the machinations behind this particular

industry and how things come together and how, if you're a luxury consumer,

you pick a destination. I mean, that's basically...

what your world is all about, you know, and how does a consumer get a great

experience? I mean, at the end of the day.

But don't you think, I mean, since you did this, as this is part of your professional

background as well, a long time ago, but not that much has changed, I think.

No, not much has changed in terms of how the processes work.

Yeah. I mean, it's far more sophisticated. And to your earlier question about

AI, yes, AI is going to, you know, the future laboratories sent out their 26th predictive report.

And they had a target, you know, AI is obviously going to play a role.

I think it has a very specific role to play beyond which it's maybe not terrifically

useful until AI can be trusted to process factual information in a 100% legitimate fashion.

I'm not sure I'm going to go searching too deep, but I think what AI is currently

quite good for is the person who sits down in like Manchester and says,

I have this much money, I want five days of sun, I want access to a beach,

and it needs to be within a four and a half hour flight of where I am.

Absolutely. And it blurts out lots of options.

And then you need to go elsewhere to deepen your research on that.

But that brass tacks service is very much, I think, the legitimate role of AI.

But won't it also change the industry in the sense that you'll be cutting out

a lot of people that are doing that role now?

You can bypass. I mean, forget the luxury market, which is where your world attention is.

But it's in there, too.

Yes, but I think the luxury world, you still need someone to interpret to dig out what you need.

But the more average trip, you don't need a travel agent anymore.

You don't.

You can just get on ChatGPT or book your flight and then book your own tours

if you want to do a tour. I mean, it is doable.

It's 100% doable. And I speak the travel agent designer thing.

I speak more to a readership of my magazine.

To answer your question about where will this influence where they go,

how people travel and where they go, I'm sure it will.

But I like to think that there will always be an element of...

whimsy and kind of being influenced

by something in intuition and being I mean I

remember 17 years ago probably there's a

beautiful Italian design magazine called Case d'habitare and

they dedicated an entire issue to New Zealand because New Zealand was having

a bit of a design moment fair on hay and big architects working there and there

was an article in that magazine about Waiheke Island and it just stayed in my

head and it stayed in my head and it stayed in my head and I finally made it there in 2013 or 2014.

Did it meet your...

Yes. It did. Like, I want to live there one day. I mean, it's amazing.

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of...

It's kind of far out.

It's far away from everything. So actually living in New Zealand,

unless you're like properly retiring, it can afford to get round.

Or you really want to live off grid.

But it was... That article captured my imagination and it was just on the list.

Yeah. That's also true of Egypt.

For sure. And I think you're absolutely, you've nailed it when you say articles

about travel are about an aspiration and inspiration.

If they're well done. Information, aspiration. Exactly.

I mean, you're selling a dream, right? That's basically it. Thanks for joining me today.

I'm Malak Fouad and the show is produced by Chirag Desai. You can leave us a

comment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or on Instagram as well as on our

website and let us know what you thought of the episode. I'll be back next week

with a brand new Encore episode.

And this time we have all-around rock star Bobby Chinn back in the hot seat.

I hope you can join me then.