The best place to sit is in the back of the church. Closest to the center aisle. Someone told me that before my first Luminiscence show at the Basilica de Notre-Dame in Nice, and they were right. From back there, when the lights drop, the color comes down the whole length of the nave toward you, the kaleidoscope spreading across the vaults. I’ve queued up early every time to get my seat.

I love churches wherever I go. I like the history, the architecture, the hush of them. So the last time I sat there, watching it come apart in color, I thought: a building that usually only draws a crowd on Sunday mornings, full on a Thursday night. I meant it as a good thing. I’m still not sure it only is.

The Basilica de Notre Dame is the setting for a light show that runs three nights a week. On Fridays, you can hear it with a live choir; on other nights, it plays with digital music. I always choose the choir. To me, the difference is hardly worth arguing over, but the basilica feels more alive that way. I’ve seen three shows there, and each time the building became a stage.

Old churches are mysterious places full of tradition and ritual. The gold leaf, the candles, the heavy silence. Some old reflex still wants me to genuflect. This was nothing like that.

Since 2023, it’s spread from cathedral to cathedral, Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, London, Philadelphia, São Paulo. Each show is made for that church. The narration, music, and projections fit its history and architecture. In Bordeaux, dozens of hidden projectors are calibrated to the stone itself. You can’t see the Nice show anywhere else; different building, different story. The old masons shaped these vaults over centuries. Now programmers are measuring them to the millimeter so the light can follow the same surfaces. Maybe that’s not desecration. Maybe it’s just a modern spin on ancient architecture.

The experience is more than the arches and saints. It’s the building’s history, the music, and the light across the ceiling. You see angels and clouds like the Sistine Chapel, then the Milky Way, then an arboretum where raindrops hit the glass.

Compare it to the Rembrandt and Van Gogh immersive shows. Warehouse or simple box style rooms. No soul to sell. Impressive in their own right, the experience is different. It is sight and sound but without the depth of marred history, mystery, architecture, and reverence. The space itself was not sacrificed for the show.

Hall des Lumières in Manhattan is more of a middle ground between warehouse immersive art and the cathedrals. A former Beaux-Arts bank (the old Emigrant Savings Bank) built around 1909 is a temple of money reborn as a temple of art. The light show is still impressive, and with the building’s unique H design allows you to move about the room, different vantage points, alcoves, and cavernous ceilings.

The place that is not only a projection screen but the subject is the Basilica de Notre Dame, and the other churches. Still consecrated, still holds Mass, and the show often tells the basilica’s own story across its own vaults. The building is a living shrine of sorts. Alive because of its parishioners. What’s left of them, anyway.

Empty pews, the cost of keeping these buildings standing, tourism is survival. Cologne Cathedral now charges admission, money earmarked for the roof. The light show isn’t sacrilege, so much as a lifeline. In France, only about 2% of Catholics attend Mass every Sunday, and just 7–8% practice regularly. Otherwise its crickets, with the occasional visitor lighting a candle, or kneeling in worship. The collection plate can only do so much.

Where Istanbul Draws the Line

I took off my shoes, the borrowed scarf slipping, and stood at the back of the Blue Mosque while prayer kept moving up front. You feel right away it is still a working mosque. People coming and going, a rhythm you don’t want to be the one to break. So the light show, when they run it, stays outside. They throw it on the walls after dark and everyone watches from the square.

Across the plaza, Hagia Sophia has been everything. Cathedral, mosque, museum, mosque again. The layers are all still in there. But it prays again now, and you don’t run a spectacle through a room full of people on their knees.

Here they keep the show on the outside walls. The buildings that let it inside are the ones where almost no one kneels anymore. Like Nice.

What the lightshow does not buy, and what the Church keeps hoping it will, is faith. The pitch, especially in the American cathedrals, is that the awe is a doorway, get them in for the spectacle and maybe some of them stay for the God. Come for the lights, stay for the rest. Maybe. I’ve never seen anyone count the person who bought a ticket and came back for Mass. I didn’t.

In Paris, people have been ready to call in an exorcist over contemporary art in churches. Repeated traditionalist protest. Most recently as this month at an art installation in a Paris church during the Nuit Blanche festival. Despite the pushback, the show still went on.

They’re protesting a silent disco with drinks, an Eminem playlist, a provocative art installation. None of it has anything to do with the church it’s playing in. That’s what brings the petitions out. The light show is a different animal. It’s pulled from the church’s own history, built for that one room and useless anywhere else, which is maybe why nobody was protesting outside in Nice, at least not on the nights I was there. A disco just wants the walls. Luminescence wants the building.

What does the light show actually buy? All of this.

The answer starts with money, which the diocese is not talking about. These buildings are money pits. The roof, the stone, the heating bill in a room the size of a soccer pitch. The collection plate stopped covering that a long time ago. A show that sells out three nights a week gets closer than Sunday’s offerings do anymore. Some of the ticket money goes to a production company. This is a business, not a charity. A portion goes to the building’s own repairs, and the bigger money lands in the town. The people who come for the show fill the hotels and the restaurants and the trains. Looking at the numbers, they are boring in an accountant sort of way and staggering. England’s cathedrals put a couple hundred million into local economies in a year. That is what tourism is supposed to do. Benefit the people who live there.

Luminiscence and other similar shows have sold over 4 million tickets. You can have whatever feelings you want about that. The feelings don’t fix the roof.

I’ve stepped into churches throughout my travels. None were lit like this. This time I was inside, in the dark, looking nowhere else. Not taking in the statues, the crucifixes, not stopping to light a candle. The narration was in French. I don’t speak French, but I followed the story anyway, through color, light and sound. I kept going back, and I brought someone new each time. There was always something I had missed before. The building felt larger the longer I sat there.

Which leaves me about where I started. Back of the church, on the inside aisle, on a stranger’s tip, waiting for it to go dark. A building that sat empty six days out of seven, now full and paying for its own roof. I know some people would call that a step too far. Me, I think it’s a blessing.

What are your thoughts as to churches becoming an attraction beyond religion?

Leave a comment

For saints, sinners, and the just plain curious.

Answered prayers, the logistical kind.

Q: What is Luminiscence?
A: An immersive light-and-sound show projected inside historic cathedrals. It combines 360-degree video mapping with music, sometimes a live choir, to tell the story of the building. It’s produced by the French company LOTCHI, now part of Banijay Live.

Q: Where can I see Luminiscence shows?
A: The show tours cathedrals across Europe and beyond. Past and current cities include Nice, Bordeaux, Paris, Strasbourg, Reims, London, Brussels, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and São Paulo. Locations rotate, so check the official site for what’s running now.

Q: Where can I buy tickets?
A: Through the official site, luminiscence.com, and ticketing platforms like Fever, Tiqets, and GetYourGuide.

Q: How much do tickets cost?
A: In Nice, prices start around 12 euros. Pricing varies by city and seating.

Q: How long is the show?
A: About 45 to 50 minutes.

Q: When does it run?
A: In Nice, three nights a week, typically Thursday through Saturday, with two showings a night. Schedules differ by city.

Q: Is it suitable for children?
A: Yes. In Nice there’s no minimum age, and small children are welcome on a lap.

Q: What’s the best seat?
A: Toward the back, on the center aisle. That’s where the projections converge and the color runs the full length of the nave toward you.

Q: Are there other cathedral light shows besides Luminiscence?
A: Yes, and it’s spreading fast. AURA runs in Montréal and at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Luxmuralis tours cathedrals across the UK. Hall des Lumières in New York does the same idea inside a former bank. Luminiscence is the biggest name, not the only one.

Q: What is AURA?
A: An immersive light-and-sound experience created by Montréal studio Moment Factory. The original runs inside Notre-Dame Basilica in Montréal, and a version plays at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. It turns the architecture itself into the canvas, with orchestral music and projection mapping.

Q: What is Luxmuralis?
A: A British art collective, the artist Peter Walker and composer David Harper, that stages immersive light-and-sound shows inside cathedrals. It tours UK cathedrals and has appeared at Washington National Cathedral in the US, with themed installations like Space, Life, and Time.

Q: Is it disrespectful to hold a light show in a church?
A: Depends who you ask. The shows run outside of Mass, tell the building’s own story, and rarely draw protest. The objections tend to land on silent discos and Eminem playlists, not on a show pulled from the church’s own history. After three visits, my take: a full church beats an empty one. Yours may differ.

And if light and sound shows at a cathedral have you grabbing your rosary tighter, here is a video of a now famous Catholic priest DJ’s techno music. If you watch this, you may want to go to confession.

It was 2010. I was a long way from Mexico. My friend Kelly had lived in Akumal, my pueblo on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Animal welfare was her thing. She organized spay-and-neuter clinics. The kind of woman who was not afraid to get dirt under her fingernails. Down-to-earth, hardworking, gritty. She invited me to join her on a Humane Society International project to Tanzania, “dog and donkey clinics” in the bush. Without a second thought I said “yes, but no buses.” Kelly explained we would have handlers and a driver to escort us.

The trip began in Arusha, Tanzania, just south of the Kenya border and home to Mt. Kilimanjaro. I climbed it two years later. A tale for another time. Yohana from Tanzania Animal Protection Organization met us. Donkeys are the John Deere tractor of many people in Tanzania. Yet, farmers are notorious for putting oxen yokes on their donkeys, which causes injuries. Kelly’s job was to talk to the farmers about their burros, vaccinate dogs and sometimes a clinic turned into field triage.

Our driver Ernesto drove us west from Arusha. A well-educated, handsome guy. Doing side hustle guiding and driving while looking for a job. We were not on safari and did not need a guide. That was not to say we didn’t want to have some fun along the way. We took the road less traveled in our Land Rover. Out to Ngorongoro Crater for a glimpse of the Big Five. I read the crater was the place to see black rhinos. We saw huge tusked elephant bulls, lions like the cliche, lounging in trees, and herds of wildebeest and zebra. Lots of zebras. No black rhinos.

We were quite the traveling road show. Village to village. Questionable hotels and dorm rooms. Fried street food in the small cities, kebabs or coo-coo and chips, fried chicken and French fries. We avoided water and juices. Cokes or bottled beer. Less chance of a parasite that way.

I remember one day the only thing we had to eat was stale crackers and warm beer.

A few of the towns had a local bar. We went in the evening for a beer and a game of pool.

Across the road from a rice processing plant, women sifted discarded husks in a field for half grains of rice. Bagging the rice to take home. The women had a great laugh as they tried to teach the two muzungo (white people) Kelly and I to sift rice. We never got the hang of it. The husbands sat under a shade tree. Kelly went over and talked donkey yokes. From the field across from the rice mill, we were ushered into a beat up old car and on to the next town.

At the clinics I helped with rabies injections for the dogs. In an open-air metal barn the town queued up for vaccines. Grubby, skinny hounds were led by boys and men on lengths of rope.

One stop became a donkey M*A*S*H episode.

A donkey’s back achilles tendon had been slashed with a machete by a pissed off neighbor. From what we were told, the donkey had gotten loose and tramped into the guy’s garden. The animal was in desperate condition lying in the dirt. A makeshift needle, heavy thread, a five-gallon bucket of water. Kelly prepped to suture. He was not sedated, just patient. Big brown eyes. All of town gathered around to watch. Kelly with the help of some of the guys sewed and closed the gash. The donkey would be lame, but alive. Then with rope, fabric and gauze Kelly made a makeshift sling to hold the hind leg up. He was going to make it.

Two weeks later we learned a hyena killed him. We had tried.

Juma was our point person in Kahama. As we drove in an old beater through the outskirts of town, I saw a woman plowing the yard. A stick with a scoop tied to the end as a hoe. A mud brick house behind her. Juma said a lot of households were run by women now. The men had died in wars or from HIV/AIDS. Here she was, plowing by hand.

From Kahama, we were to continue west headed to Kigoma. Our driver said he would not go any further. Full stop. Hijackings on the highway. He bowed out.

We took the bus.

On the bus with the partially shattered windshield, we pushed through a crowd at sunrise to get on. Yohana came to see us aboard. Inside, Kelly and I grabbed two seats together. I took the window. Kelly took the aisle. We did not plan to get out until Kigoma. Heavy backpacks on our laps. We dehydrated ourselves so we would not have to make a potty stop and risk our seats. Plus a hole in the floor over skid-plates as a restroom was far from appealing. Prince Valium helped us sleep along the rough highway. Time drifted by.

Delirious, we arrived in Kigoma, the furthest western part of the country. And we had hotel reservations! Off the bus, we wandered looking for our hotel. Suddenly I saw a zebra, and I thought I was hallucinating from dehydration and sedatives. “Hey Kelly, I see a zebra.” Kelly saw three zebras, only for us to realize we were standing in a small herd was roaming near our hotel. The hotel was small and resort-style but a far cry from posh. The window air conditioner was loud and we were grateful for it. Two beds. A private bathroom. We did not have to share.

The next morning, we were taking a boat up Lake Tanganyika to Gombe. Gombe is where Jane Goodall’s camp was with her chimps just south of the Burundi border. A big wooden boat with an open berth. No cabins, no seats, no head. It reminded me of a “chicken bus” in Mexico or Guatemala. There must have been an easy 70 or so people on board. Chickens, big plastic containers of gasoline, cases of Coca-Cola, flour, other supplies. Chock full.

For me this was a ride to the next stop on my adventure. To the other passengers, it was a grocery run.

You had to find a place to sit. You either stood the entire time, or you found a little spot on the gunwale. We parked our butts for three hours on the rail as we made our way up the lake. As we took this heavily burdened boat up the lake, a guy had to bail water at the same time because there was a leak. Someone was always bailing water out of the bottom of the boat. I wondered how many people on board could swim.

I sat next to two young Tanzanian boys and took a picture with them holding up the Tanzania flag.

The day was hot. A woman near me stood with her toddler in her arms. She looked tired. She did not speak English. I gestured. She handed her child to me. He slept against my chest until her village. Then I handed him back.

The boat stopped at little villages along the lake. We were the last stop. There were fewer and fewer passengers with each stop until we were the last people aboard.

At Gombe we were staying in the cinder block dorm building. Our dorm room had a toilet with no seat, or door. You could do your business and shower at the same time. A communal room with tables and chairs for socializing.

Baboons everywhere. The windows had bars on them to keep them out. From the inside it felt like jail. At night baboons rattled the bars and tried to get into the building. When baboons roar, they sound like big cats, like lions.

During the day, we hiked the mountainside with a guide. We found a troop of chimps and sat with them. I swear one of them was less than two meters from me, about five or six feet. You could take pictures. Just keep a low profile. There one time I sat in tall grass on the mountainside and looked across at the Congo. Wow, there’s the Congo, there’s Burundi, there’s a chimp.

Jane’s camp was different. A roof over open air. Walls of chicken wire. Her desk. Her bed. Her books. No walls between her and the jungle. From wherever she sat she could see out. More rustic than our dorm.

Three or four days later, we did the whole boat trip in reverse, back down the lake to Kigoma. From Kigoma we flew to Dar es Salaam, our gateway back to the States and Mexico. That night in Dar es Salaam, we had a nice hotel room. Two women who had not had a shower in a few days. Questionable food, warm beer, and here we were in a nice hotel. Each of us had what we considered to be nice clothes. If they were clean, they were considered nice.

That night, dressed up in our clean clothes, we went to the hotel restaurant. The hotel was a nondescript chain. The restaurant felt fancy after time in the bush. The menu. The drinks. The service. They brought us a gin and tonic with ice in it. We did not talk much. What do you say after a trip like that. We were grateful. The shower. The ice. The clean clothes. The whole trip.

We took our separate planes home from Dar es Salaam.

It was not goodbye. Never is, with us.

On the second floor of the Tourismuseum in Unterseen there is a display tracking the six-day hiking route Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took through the Bernese Oberland in 1779. They had his dates, his route, and even journal entries. I stood there a while, reading it all.

Switzerland was not on my list. My sister wanted to go. Once there, I was fascinated to learn about how long Interlaken has hosted guests and tourism. I have lived in or near tourism towns most of my life, and some in the mountain regions, but it never occurred to me that Interlaken was one of the first destinations to embrace Alpine tourism. Alpine tourism didn’t start with ski lifts or snowboards. For a long time, people saw the Alps as something to cross, not somewhere to vacation.

Share

Places like Interlaken, Grindelwald, and Lauterbrunnen were attracting Romantic-era travelers and artists. They came for the scenery. Really, it’s the cliffs, the waterfalls, and that almost unreal feeling you only get in the Alps.

Interlaken quickly became a place for wealthy visitors. People who’d come to “take the cure.” They’d stay for weeks, breathing the mountain air. Doctors back then prescribed goat’s whey for nerves, digestion, lung trouble, and just about every complaint blamed on city life. I learned that every morning before sunrise, local goat herders would hike down from the high pastures with wooden tubs of fresh, warm whey on their backs, so guests could have it at breakfast.

Local aristocrats staged the first festival at castle ruins outside town. Farmers performed stone-tossing, wrestling, and yodeling for European tourists. The start of Swiss cultural tourism. Traditions like yodeling are still part of the region’s folklore today.

Interlaken kept noticing what wealthy travelers would pay for, then shaping the next version of the experience to sell them.

The Tourismuseum is the only museum in Switzerland dedicated to the history of tourism. It’s in a clergy house built in 1640. Four floors full of history on the souvenir trade, transport, mountaineering, and hospitality. The displays go back to the 1770s. They show how locals decided what to protect (the landscape, the view, traditional practices) and what to sell to tourists (experiences, transport, hospitality, souvenirs).

The Höhematte Meadow is the best example. In the 1860s the Belle Époque, a period of prosperity and cultural growth was hitting Interlaken. Grand hotels going up.

The Grand Beau-Rivage opened in 1874. Steamships across Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. Speculators eyeing the unobstructed view of the Jungfrau, the most valuable open ground in the valley, for a hotel and casino zone.

Thirty-seven local landowners, farmers and local hoteliers watched developers circling the meadow. As a co-op they purchased the land. Nothing shall ever be built on the Höhematte, and the view of the mountains shall be preserved forever.

They understood the view was worth more empty than full of buildings.

The view is what people come for.

You can stand on the Höhematte now and look at the same mountain the British aristocrats saw in 1850. The view is not luck. It is a 160-year-old civic agreement. The farmers then could not have pictured what the meadow gets used for now. Paragliders. Lots of them. They launch off the cliffs above town in colored canopies and float down to the same field the speculators wanted to pave. The pact stands. The view stays. The field still belongs to everyone.

It’s deliberate.

Even the cows in the valleys are intentional. The country pays the farmers to keep them there. You hear the bells from across a field, ringing as the cows shift their feet. The bells are how the farmer knows where the cows are. The country decided a long time ago that what tourists were paying to see had to be real.

Protecting the view was one decision. Made it once, and it's held for 160 years. Keeping a town livable is the opposite kind of problem. There is no pact you sign and walk away from. It is a fight that resets every year, up against the same money that never really goes away.

I am not going to pretend Interlaken has solved the problems of tourism. It hasn’t. In the Lauterbrunnen valley buses run between the villages all day, every day, full of visitors on their way somewhere. The village priest, Markus Tschanz, told Swiss public broadcaster SRF that the people of Lauterbrunnen feel like employees in an amusement park. Even the carpenter, he said, has become a tourist employee. They cannot escape it, because they live there. I worked in an amusement park for years. He’s right.

I walked along the Lauterbrunnen valley trail JRR Tolkien walked at 19 years old. The trails in the valley felt close to sacred, mystical. Or maybe that was just me. Every so often a small sign asked visitors to keep their voices low, mind their dog, and to tread carefully. People did. I also found the modern day farm stands along the path.

Self-service cabinets sit at the end of farmer’s driveways in the Lauterbrunnen valley. Wooden, on legs, with glass-front refrigerators inside. Inside the fridge are wedges of cheese with handwritten paper labels, fresh veg, dried meats and jars of pickled things. A small painted cow on the side as the only signage.

There is a coin slot, and I actually saw one with a credit card swipe. No farmer in sight.

You open the door. You take what you want. You pay. You keep walking.

I bought cheese and meat sticks from no one, twice that week.

My friend Kashi lives in Interlaken. We worked together in Mexico thirty years ago. She runs vacation rentals here. We talked about the challenges of rentals and Airbnb, plus the community and similar stories I’ve heard from owners and managers wherever I’ve gone.

We talked about the town. Kashi told me that even kindergarteners are taught to walk to school on their own. The kids take the train alone. Her two boys have been riding up to the ski mountains by themselves since they were eight, putting their gear on at the platform, spending the day skiing, then coming home.

In a place that has been hosting strangers for 250 years, they have still built for their own kids, not just for the people with cameras. You see it in small things. An unwatched cheese fridge. The fact that Kashi didn’t even know there were Interlaken police.

This isn’t tourism done well. It’s what’s at stake.

During the years Kashi has been building her rental business, Interlaken has seen second homes rise by nearly 30%. The town also enacted a two-year building freeze while a group figures out how to slow the conversion of homes into rentals. The Lauterbrunnen council has proposed a 5 to 10 franc entry fee on day-trippers, exempting anyone who books local lodging or arrives by train. April is one of the months the tourism boards have been steering visitors toward, to take some of the July-August pressure off.

We came at the right time by accident.

Interlaken has had 250 years to figure this out. It still hasn't. Most places don't get that long.

There are good Mexico days and bad Mexico days. I was having a bad Mexico day. Perhaps it was the scorpion on the inside of the shower curtain while I showered. Maybe it was the make-shift flame thrower of a Bic lighter and can of hairspray needed to kill the cockroaches. Maybe it’s because I left home almost three months ago to a place where I did not know the language or culture. Maybe because the day ended in “why”. Why was I here?

Bad Mexico days make you question every decision you made up to this point.

That day also happened to be February 14. Valentine’s Day. Hallmark had not found its way to the Caribbean coast. Chocolates? No chocolatier. Hell, Hershey’s Kisses had not even been in stores yet. But that afternoon Gary got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Secretly I believed it was because I was crying and he had not thought of a gift.

He had chosen Valentine’s so he’d remember the date.

Of course I said yes. Yes, because we renovated the house in Baltimore together. Yes, we relocated to a foreign country together. Yes, he was my exploration partner and we knew we had each other’s back.

There was no ring for the moment. His mom’s ring sat in a safety deposit box in Baltimore.

Subscribe now

We picked Halloween as the wedding date. I always said because getting married is fucking scary. Gary picked it because it was his grandfather’s birthday. And it was also just before Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. So why the hell not.

We wanted to be married in a cave. Of course it is hard to get a justice of the peace or clergyman into an underwater cave. We picked the cenote that would look beautiful in the photos.

Invitations were sent to the printer.

Then our friend Buddy offered to build us a platform over the water at Dos Ojos. We’d been exploring that cave system. A huge cenote, drip-stone covered in moss and mold, clear blue water, mot-mots calling, a true hidden-world feeling. On the invites, all 15 of them, I crossed out the original location and penned in Dos Ojos.

The process of getting married in Mexico is through a justice of the peace. We went to the Registro Civil (Civil Registry Office) in Playa. It was a lengthy document, in Spanish. Typed out on a real typewriter with real carbon paper and kept in the municipal records in a bitácora. Now this document is probably the biggest fuck up I made in Mexico. And it all has to do with my name. I did my name wrong on the form. Maiden name, mother’s last name, and Walten. I have many aliases in Mexico. That is part of the reason I still go by Walten today. Undoing it in two countries isn’t worth it.

The other box we checked wrong was who owns what. If we own things in “common” or separate. We could not read Spanish. We just took our best guess, and checked the box. At that time we owned nothing but the dive gear we arrived with, so did not over think the decision. Blood tests done.

Destination weddings were not a thing, so we did not invite people from abroad. We could not justify asking people to fly in for a wedding in the jungle. The only exception was my parents. Who also served as a mule, to smuggle in bottles of champagne from the States. I bought a small bouquet from the only florist in Cancun for $40. A guy hawking silver at the top of the hotel zone in Cancun sold us wedding bands, $12. Still in a drawer somewhere. And a cake from the only bakery in Playa, $30. That was 50% of our wedding budget.

By October, we had moved to Akumal, a beachside village with eleven full-time residents. The people who worked at the hotel in town lived in Mayan villages in the Yucatán, Katunil and Sotuta, and went home to their families by bus or colectivo, once a month.

The morning of the wedding I drank a Bartles and James wine cooler for breakfast, overlooking Half Moon Bay from our condo at Las Iguanas. Calming my jitters. And there waiting was the mother of the bride in a tropical print outfit, with pretty sandals. I marched her right around and told her to put on her jungle shoes. The jungle is no place for pretty sandals.

Cenote Dos Ojos lies about halfway between the village of Akumal and Tulum. About two kilometers into the jungle. Today you can drive right up to it. Back then there was a very rough road not made for cars. Our friend Buddy, part inventor, part zen disciple, built jungle road warrior trucks. Frankensteins of the automotive world. We loaded the wedding party up into the back end of two trucks and headed out to the cenote, where Buddy had built the platform over the water. We were the first people to be married there. And maybe still the only.

Of course the JOP was late. No one warned him he had to hike two clicks into the jungle. We had to tip him extra for the hike.

There were about 10 people there along with my parents. Most everyone was a cave diver. Someone brought a plus-one. Gloria. Originally from Havana, she offered to sing a Spanish love song. A cappella, her voice rose up into the dark where the lights didn’t reach. My dad toasted Gary, called him a gentle man, then toasted us. Even the toughest cave divers had a tear in their eye.

Once back by the highway, a woman in a huipil was waiting with her young son. He walked up to me with a handful of wildflowers he had picked, and handed them over. I gave him a kiss on the cheek as thanks.

The reception was at La Lunita in Akumal. The restaurant was not open yet for the season, but Annette the owner extended an invitation to host us and our ragtag wedding party. A tiny skeleton bride and groom sat on top of the cake as we did the celebratory mordida, “the bite” where we try to shove each other’s face into the cake.

Gary and I were married more than twenty years. I can’t tell you the year we divorced. Divorced in the US, still married in Mexico. We weren’t going to pay two sets of lawyers in two countries, and there was a better reason than that. If anything happened to either one of us in Mexico, the only people they let into the ICU are spouses.

My ring. It was beautiful, and I had it for years. Kept it in our safe so I would not lose it diving. I still wish I had it. A safe is only safe if it doesn’t get stolen. One of the many times we were robbed, they took the safe, and the ring inside it.

What remains from our wedding aside from the story are images stuck together in an old wedding album, sitting in a Texas storage locker. Of course my dad, proud of his oldest daughter, would always show friends and family his favorite photo from that day. Me squatting in the jungle with my skirt hiked up, peeing. His daughter is in her element.

Missed the reception?

You can still buy me a drink.

What's the strangest wedding you've been to? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

There are more stories on the way. Pull up a chair.

“I prefer to go in at the seaside road,” Stefanos said, “to see the place where I give the ring.”

It was a small chapel above the sea in the settlement of Aeolos. “Panagia Katafygiotissa” on Katafygi Bay. The walls were painted by a man named Dimitris Mytaras, whose name I had not heard. But then again why would I. I knew nothing about Greece. Stefanos asked what we cared about and then he built our day together from that.

The only place my sister and I wanted to see, the must see, was the Temple of Poseidon. That was the whole list.

The white-washed chapel was not on any list. It was his. It was the place he proposed to his wife. He could only get in because friends lived in the village.

Mexico’s Riviera Maya, from 1992, with a boyfriend and two trucks of dive gear and $7000 USD. I know what it costs to give a stranger your day, your knowledge, your country. I know what gets traded when the price is money. And I know what the years do to the people who keep giving it away honestly.

A friend gave me his name before I flew over. She is American and Greek, and she hires Stefanos every time she lands in Athens.

He kept talking.

He had been talking all morning. The way someone talks who has things he wants you to know about the place he lives in, and about himself, because he can’t separate the two.

His daughter was nine. His wife was from Crete and owned a beauty salon in the neighborhood we drove through. He worked from before sunrise to past midnight, some days to two in the morning when the overnight flights came in.

Those are long-ass days.

But that’s high season anywhere. You work when there’s work.

He was not from Athens. Paros was home, his parents still there. He flies back often. The car comes by ferry. The long boat ride he can’t stand. One small island is his favorite though, and not a famous one. Schinoussa. Down past Naxos. Tiny, 229 people. The water he could not describe was that beautiful.

Taste tsipouro, not ouzo, he said. Ouzo gives you nothing but a headache. (Yes, I knew that from personal experience.) The best wine in Greece was Malagouzia. Then he spoke of a motorbike accident in 2010, the one that made him pray and keep praying. He went to church every Sunday now.

All day he showed us places and how to see them without the admission price or the queue. The back way to ruins and the photograph no one else had found.

Then he pulled the car over. “Get out,” he said, “I will stay with the car. Go watch, it’s very traditional.” It was a changing of the guard at the president's residence, on a side street, no crowd, just a handful of people.

We stood a few feet from the ceremony. A tour bus would never travel this side street. A regular taxi would have driven straight past, but not him.

At the Temple of Poseidon he told how the sea got its name. Aegeus's son Theseus went to Crete to kill the monster Minotaur. He promised his father he would come back under white sails if he lived. Theseus killed Minotaur, got drunk on the way home and forgot to change the sails. Aegeus saw black sails. He threw himself off the cliffs. That is the Aegean Sea.

Then, without changing tone, he said the average salary in Greece was 880 euros ($1020 USD) a month. Before the crisis, in 2004, 2005, if you didn't have coffee in your house you went next door and the neighbor gave you coffee. Now if you knock, the neighbor won’t open the door. He said it the same way he said his daughter was nine. The same way he said Malagouzia.

I knew this. I had told a version of it myself, in Mexico, by the end. The pressure of tourism shows up first in the smallest gestures, the ones that used to be free. But it shows up second in something harder to put your finger on: the willingness to give a stranger the inside of your life. He was still handing it over. He was driving us along the seaside instead of the highway so he could show us where he gave his wife the ring. He was nine years into the job and he had not yet learned to stop.

I can say this because I did the same thing. I whored out my whole life for the business, for the customers. It helped. The business worked. Was the price worth it, I still wonder. So I knew what I was watching when I watched him. I had been him.

But then he gave me what I used to give my guests. The day. The stories. The thing you cannot buy because it was never for sale. I had spent a career handing it to strangers. Now a stranger handed it back to me. The friends I made were never an accident. They were the selfish reason I kept going.

I should be honest. I am glad I went to Athens. I do not need to go back. Maybe I am too much of an outdoors or small town girl. It was congested and the noise did not stop.

The graffiti was everywhere. He drove through all of it. He still handed us his story. His daughter, his island, his wife’s ring, his Sunday church, his favorite wine. The city was wearing him down. He had not let it take the work.

He told me about the cruise ships. Three, four a day into Piraeus now. Two thousand people at a time. They walk off the boat for a few hours and walk back on. They do not sleep on the island. They do not eat a meal there. “They buy only one salad, and one ice cream, and one souvenir,” he said. “Only that.”

You cannot see a place that way, he said. You want minimum two days. One island, one place, something. I had one day. He told me you need two. The next morning I flew to Santorini like everyone else. He gave me a full day. I was already leaving.

But that was Santorini, the next day. Back in Athens, the driver still had hours to go.

His daughter was sick. The nine-year-old. She was home waiting for him to take her to the doctor while he drove us through Athens. He mentioned it once and kept driving. My sister and I both insisted he drop us off early and go take care of her.

He bought us souvenirs. He paid for them out of his own pocket, small things, before he left us at the Acropolis. A sick child waiting at home, the 880-euro month most Greeks live on, and he bought us souvenirs.

Then he came back. After we had walked the hill and seen the marble, he came back for us at the end of the day. The last thing he did was make us promise. “Do not take a taxi off the street, they cannot be trusted”.

This is how Stefanos lives. One person trusts him and hands him the next. My friend, then me, then whoever I tell. The cruise ship needs none of it. It does not need his name, it does not need to trust him, and it never comes back. Two thousand people, a salad, an ice cream, gone by dark.

I spent 27 years building the same thing he has, one guest at a time. Trust you cannot put on a brochure. It does not scale. It was never meant to.

That is what is worth flying for. Not the view. The man who takes the long way to show you where he gave his wife the ring.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a glass of Malagouzia wine. It keeps me something to sip after a long day of writing.

Buy Me A Glass of Wine

The promoted version is the coastline, the festival, the Michelin chef, the views. It’s the two sentences in the tourism brochure, the photo taken in October that brings visitors in March, the “emerging food scene” with three restaurants and two of them seasonal.

The other version is the woman who tells you to ignore the menu. The family that’s fed people at that crossroads for three centuries while the military took two-thirds of their village. The son who chose to come back. The lemon orchard that almost disappeared and came back because two people decided it was worth planting. The bakery that closed not because of too many tourists, but because not enough people live there anymore.

I’ve spent 35 years inside this industry. Business owner first, in Mexico’s Riviera Maya when there was one gas station in Playa. Then internet entrepreneur, professor, consultant. I’ve watched the official version get made. I know why it ends up as two sentences about Templar chapels and the rhythm of the seasons.

Destination Sunday is where I write about what gets left out. Some weeks it’s a field piece, a place I went, something I found, what it reveals about how destinations survive or don’t. Some weeks it’s a closer look at how the industry works: why landing on a travel list can break a small town before it helps it, why the repeat guest is invisible in most destination reports, why more marketing rarely fixes what’s broken.

You don’t need to work in hospitality or tourism to follow this.

Share

Most of the time the gap has a person standing in it.

The woman at the hotel in Comps-sur-Artuby told me to ignore the menu and look in the case instead. She waved off my spilled drink. She brought lavender ice cream I hadn’t ordered and didn’t charge me for the drink I’d knocked over.

The family has been doing that since 1737.

The tourism association gave the village two sentences.

If something I wrote made you think, laugh, or feel like someone finally said the thing — buy me a margarita. It keeps me on the road, at the bar, and writing.

Buy Me A Margarita

I was 27 years old. I felt all of 7.

Foreign face, foreign culture, foreign language, and I am the foreigner.

My first job, in Mexico, at the first all inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen. Seemingly the first American to be part of the resort staff.

Two months before I had an office in Baltimore. A window, a secretary, business lunches, and business suits. A dive shop owner and cave explorer, Mike Madden called long distance one day and asked me if my boyfriend Gary and I wanted to come work for him in Mexico.

“What does it pay?” Mike told me to fax my resume.

Four pages. Four pages that took me 20 minutes to send since the long distance connection to his fax machine kept dropping. Let’s see there was marketing for Kraft General Foods. New frozen pizza test marketing for Pillsbury, beer promotions with NASCAR, event marketing for Lipton Ice Tea. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7 up and blah blah blah. Yes I was proud of my resume.

A fax came back. “Nice resume.” “$400”. “Dollars”.

“A month.”

I was to run a dive concession at the new Diamond Resort. Sharing a space where two girls who handed out beach towels to guests, as I hustled people to try to Discover Scuba classes in the pool. Ironically it was only a handful of years earlier I was the tourist taking a discover scuba class at a resort myself.

Subscribe now

Yet it was these two cute girls, young women, who handed out towels, Nellie and Gina, who watched me eat alone for a week. One day I saw them across the dining room sitting at a round table. They smiled and waved me over. I was embarrassed at being recognized as the lonely girl. Part of me almost passed at the invitation, because sitting with them meant being face to face with the fact that I was a foreigner who did not speak their language. But I knew how uncomfortable it was to eat alone.

So I walked over to join them.

A corn tortilla on its own is dry. A little sweet, a little nutty, warm cornmeal smell, not a meal until it is holding something. Up to that point I had been tearing them in half and eating them like bread. Pushing food on my fork. I had little experience eating tortillas aside from roadside taco stands. Gina watched me and laughed. Then she showed me. Slap the tortilla flat across your left hand. Bring the right hand up, slide it across the left. One motion. Roll.

That was how you ate.

We built a vocabulary broken in two languages.

Those first weeks working at the resort I commuted up from Tulum. Living in a palapa on the beach with no electricity or hot water at a place called Gatos. The studio Gary and I planned on renting would not be available until after the Christmas holiday season. A plight around the world of needing a place to live versus tourists who need a place to stay for the holidays. Evenings we listened to the shortwave radio spinning the dial for any signal that sounded like the outside world. And in the middle of the night we listened the the rats rummaging through the care package my parents had given us when we left Baltimore.

The road to the resort was dirt. Playacar was jungle. Where the Xaman-Ha aviary is now, was a garbage dump. A far cry from the booming international destination it is today.

There were good Mexico days. What people do not tell you when you become an expat is that there are bad Mexico days. Day to day life is frustrating. Convenience had not yet made it this far south. The gas station was out of gas. Immigration was a ferry ride to Cozumel. Groceries were a trip to Cancun with a cooler in the back of the truck and a half dozen stops to fill it.

The frustration compounds. Tears follow.

One night I remember getting drunk on Dos Equis, donning my red power business suit and matching shoes. Yes, I brought a couple suits from the States. I thought they might be useful. I went across the street to Mike’s home to use his phone. One of only a few phones in Puerto Aventuras and drunk dialed my mom. Collect. Drunk crying that Coca-cola used to pay to hear what I had to say, and here in Mexico no one cared. She listened, I blubbered. She told me, “you can come home anytime”. To return home was to admit failure. I was not going to fail. She knew I would not come home. She ended the call as she always does, “God bless you and keep you safe.”

A few days later I went down to the marina in Puerto Aventuras and walked into the Cedam Dive Center office where Mike’s secretary Beti worked. Beti was about my size. She dressed for the office. She had a friendly smile and not much English. The two suits I brought from the states, from the life I left behind, draped over my arm, the matching red and white patent leather shoes in hand. I told her in Spanglish that I did not need them here. If she did not want the clothes she could give them to someone who would.

She took them.

The only suit I needed in Mexico was a wet suit.

I have no idea if the shoes fit her.

I never asked.

I think she thought I was a crazy gringo.

Share

In 2012 I was on a clowning trip with my best friend, Patch Adams, and a group of other volunteer clowns in Guatemala City. “Guate” was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Our purpose was to go to orphanages and hospitals, mental institutions and, well, clown around. Make people smile, make the kids laugh, make a connection. Just what Patch Adams does. The real one, not Robin Williams in the movie. Lots of stories came from that trip. But the one that makes me cry almost every time I tell it is the old folks home.

A retirement community is way overstating what it was. A series of one-story, cinderblock buildings. Each old person had a room which looked more holding-cell like, than a home. A basic bed, small table, a chair. A few staff people flitting around the compound.

I had been living in Mexico for quite some time and knew poverty. But there was something about walking the grounds of this stark place that made the air feel heavier. Desperate. Lonelier. In Latin America, family takes care of the elderly. There was no family here.

We were there for a special lunch in a community room. Music playing, somebody’s birthday, clowning around with these old people as they ate their sandwiches on white bread. (White bread? No tortillas?)

In the corner was an old woman with fresh lipstick on. She had a small frail body like little old ladies do. Long hair pulled back from her face. You could tell in her earlier days she was a beauty. Like the vintage Buicks and Chevrolets still rolling through Havana. Dings, a touch of rust, and still something regal about them. She was dancing to the beat with a sock monkey. Just a toy. Dancing in the corner like no one was watching.

Except I was.

A woman who had probably lived better days. Days dancing with friends and family, at weddings, at parties, at birthdays. A whole life. Here she was, dancing with a sock monkey.

I choked up.

At the same time, maybe I had a raw nerve deep down. I didn’t have kids. Maybe when I’m old I will become the old lady dancing in the corner.

Maybe that is what triggers the tears

Maybe a glimpse of possible reality.

When I got there it was jungle. Sand roads, and one gas station in Playa. One in Tulum. A garbage dump where the Playacar aviary is now. The state of Quintana Roo was younger than my little sister. Everybody was a transplant. People from Mexico City who saw an El Dorado. Mayans who didn’t speak much Spanish saw work, foreigners seeking a better life saw a paradise. People running toward something, people running away from something. All of us figuring it out with whatever was at hand.

I stayed 27 years.

What I saw in that time, people going today will never see. Not because I was special. Because I was early. Because I was stubborn. Because going home meant failure and I was not going to fail.

These are those stories.

Not just Mexico. A life spent in places most people see on a map and wonder about. Smoking shisha in Istanbul. Jane Goodall’s chimps in Tanzania. Schooners in Greenland. A clown suit in Guatemala City. The first internet reservation service on that coast, built before most people knew what the internet was.

I never thought any of it was remarkable. It was just what I did.

My brothers in arms, Jim Coke and Dan Lins, told some of their stories over happy hour. They’re gone now. And their stories were buried with them.

I’m not going to let that happen to my stories.

You don’t have to go to the highest mountain or the deepest cave to have an amazing life. But if you’ve ever stood at the edge of something and wondered whether to jump, these stories are for you.

I’m a woman who after all these years is still trying to figure it out.

Welcome.

Buy Me A Margarita

This week the patriarch of the hotel, Arnaud Bain, sent me an email. Three paragraphs of thanks. A paragraph about his son, who he is proud of, and an invitation to come back.

That folks, is hospitality.

It’s the same gesture of kindness and care. Once at the table, once at the keyboard.

The Bain family has been doing it that way for 297 years.

His son’s name is Clément.

He’s 24. He has worked in kitchens since hotel school.

I am not talking flipping burgers!

Clément has worked at the Provençal truffle institution, Chez Bruno in Lorgues. The Hostellerie des Gorges de Pennafort in Callas, a country hotel-restaurant with a Michelin star. And a medieval castle turned hotel, The Château de Trigance, twenty minutes from his home.

For those of you not fluent in Michelin stars, this is not a minor league resume.

Then Paris.

Le 114 Faubourg at Le Bristol, one of the city’s palace hotels. The kind of place chefs spend careers trying to reach!

This year, Nice. At Les Agitateurs, a Michelin-starred restaurant by the port.

And next, home.

Back to Comps-sur-Artuby population 346.

In Arnaud’s words:

Mon fils sera également très content de vous lire et est également très motivé pour reprendre la suite de notre maison familiale. Il sera la dixième génération !

Roughly translated: my son will be glad to read this, and is motivated to carry on our family house. He’ll be the tenth generation.

A 24-year-old with that resume could go anywhere!

He’s choosing a village of 346 people, a hotel his family has run since 1727, a kitchen that suggests lavender ice cream to people who spill their drinks, and the tenth generation of a story that has outlasted Louis XV, the French Revolution, two world wars, and an artillery camp.

The regional tourism page still mentions chapels and seasons. It still doesn’t mention him.

If you missed the original article…

In the spring of 1985, I was a senior at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. A band geek. Marching band, jazz band, concert band. I played the baritone sax. The biggest in the saxophone family. It was almost bigger than I was. The university announced a trip for the symphony to Mexico. The director said they didn’t need a bari player. But if I could learn bass clarinet, I was in.

I learned.

The harder part was the money. My parents were going through a rough spot. I may have embellished the home situation when I pleaded with the director for a scholarship. I got it.

The only other big city I had ever experienced was a band trip to NYC in high school.

Landing in Mexico City, I had a nervous excitement I had never felt before. Spanish was not really spoken in the US at the time. At least not in Pennsylvania. Everything was foreign. VW Beetles, trucks, horns, men pushing diablos stacked with cases of Cokes. The city felt enormous and small at the same time.

We were told no shorts. Prostitutes wore shorts.

One evening a group of us girls went to a bar around the corner from the hotel. Guys took turns singing songs in Spanish and we would sing them back in English. Happy Birthday, back and forth, two languages. That night a car literally jumped the curb in front of the tuba player in her scooter-skirt.

I spent one afternoon sitting on the steps of the Presidente Hotel flirting with the doormen. When they got closer, I’d scoot up a couple steps toward the doors. They’d back away. I’d scoot back down. Nobody said a word. Teasing on the staircase.

Our first concert was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. There was no internet. No photos I had scrolled through beforehand. So I had zero expectations. Inside, the ceiling made the space feel cavernous. I was sitting in the middle of the orchestra, watching people filter in through the doors at the back of the concert hall.

I had been playing bass clarinet for six months. I was faking it and I knew it.

But when the music started, the acoustics took over. The sound blended and filled the room. The music hung in mid air. Whatever I was honking got swallowed by the hall. Only me and the person sitting next to me knew.

We played three concerts.

One day we toured the ruins of Teotihuacan. Arid, dusty, the sun scorching. No people hawking t-shirts, keychains, or ceramic mini-pyramids. On the way back we stopped at some roadside stalls. I bought some obsidian bookends and a handmade tablecloth. My mom still uses it. At this pitstop I had my first taste of pulque, a fermented drink that dates back to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The next morning off to Acapulco.

Acapulco was small then. People sunning themselves. Little kids swimming in their underwear, clutching their mother’s leg. Barkers with their wares going blanket to blanket on the sand.

Saturday night we played at Sinfonia del Mar. An open-air amphitheater near the famous La Quebrada Cliffs. Our backs to the sea, playing into the carved stone seating that amplified our sound. Waves crashed behind us and seemed to blend with the music. Across the water you could see the Tarzan House, once owned by Johnny Weissmuller and John Wayne. After the concert, our hosts provided mezcal in bamboo shot glasses. They told us to just shoot it back. It was vile tasting. We all shot it back anyway.

Our last day was Easter Sunday. A bunch of us attended mass. Not in one of the churches like Mexico City, the ones that looked like architectural art. This was a cinderblock building. Unfinished. Rebar protruding from the top of the support beams. One block back from the hotel, one block back from the beach, and it could have been a different country.

Five months later, an earthquake leveled parts of Mexico City. The opera house survived.

Menton, France is known for lemons. Lemon soap, lemon tea towels, lemon-print dresses, lemon sorbet, limoncello, and lemon tarts in every café window.

A few weeks ago, I was wandering le vieux (old) village and popped into a boutique on Rue Saint-Michel. The shopkeeper handed me a slice of Menton lemon. Rind, pith, pulp. Eat the whole thing, she said. So I did. No bitterness. The peel and pith were almost sweet.

That’s the part most people throw away.

Most visitors to Menton never taste it.

I wanted to know how a lemon could taste like that. So I went looking for the origins of the Menton lemon and contacted Maison Gannac to make a reservation to visit their mountainside orchard.

The lemons at Maison Gannac are the size of grapefruits. A few are even bigger.

I walked steep dirt paths above Menton. The path was loose under my feet. I kept stopping, stunned that branches could hold fruit that big. Huge lemons with thick peel, slightly knobbed, a deep saturated yellow that made the Meyer lemons we get in the United States look small and inadequate. On the ground was a box of freshly hand-picked Menton lemons. The leaf and a bit of branch were still attached, by law. I folded a leaf between my fingers and smelled it. It smelled like the fruit.

The peel is where the flavor lives, Laurent Gannac will tell you. Having a peel you can eat is the entire reason this lemon exists.

Every February, Menton holds a festival celebrating the lemon. A quarter of a million people come from all over. The parade floats are made of real citrus — 140 tons of it. Most of those lemons are imported from Spain. Menton lemons are too rare and too expensive to build sculptures out of.

The fruit that comes off the floats afterward gets sorted and sold. Nothing wasted. The festival, the tourism office, and the farmers all work together.

Most of the festival goers never see a working orchard.

If you do, here’s what you find.

A working farm. Not a manicured tourist attraction. The paths along the restanques, or terraces. The dry stone retaining walls that turn a cliff into farmable terraces are steep and slick with loose dirt and stones. The men who pick the fruit carry 15-kilo boxes up the slope on their shoulders. The orchard sells trees to people who want to plant their own. There are bananas growing in a small grove. The micro subtropical climate exists because of the surrounding mountains, the winds come in from the sea, and sunshine.

The view is the Mediterranean to the south and Italy to the east.

A kilo of these lemons sells for €10.9, approximately $13 USD.

There are 56 producers left in Menton.

Trained in horticulture and landscape design, Laurent Gannac chose Menton for the subtropical climate. Citrus was at the center.

He had no idea what a Menton lemon was. He had never heard of it. He was building gardens for clients, and every time he brought a lemon tree to a property, the customer would ask the same question. Is that a Menton lemon?

The repeated question forced him to find out. That is how he discovered five hundred years of history.

Around that time, he met Vanessa Zeenni. In 1991, their son Adrien was born. Laurent planted his first lemon tree the same year. Laurent bought the hillside knowing he might lose every franc. Then more parcels. He laid them out as restanques. Every retaining wall on the property is one the family built.

There were no inherited terraces. There was no inherited orchard. Just a fallow hillside and two people who decided it was worth turning back into a farm.

A lemon tree takes three to four years to bear fruit. Vanessa watered trees six hours a day. To carry the family through the wait, she trained as a hotelier and worked as a concierge in Monaco.

Adrien grew up among the trees. He says it himself in a video from a few years back.

Other people are born in cabbages. I was born among the citronniers.

He went to business school in Nice, then got an agricultural diploma at the horticulture school in Antibes. Joining his father in 2015, he brought what his father didn’t have… The idea of building a brand that ran from the tree to the shelf.

The team grew from two has grown to 30. They make almost a hundred products now. Limoncello, jams, candied lemon in salt, lemon powder, a creamy spread called L’Onctueux that he developed with the chef Philippe Colinet. They work with brewers on citrus beers. With an olive oil couple, Anne and Erwan, who make a Nice olive paste they pair with Menton lemon. Mauro Colagreco at Mirazur, the three-Michelin-star restaurant on the Italian border, cooks with Gannac lemons.

So does ChefAlain Ducasse.

The orchard visits, the boutique, all of it is farm tourism. The visit isn’t an amenity. It’s part of how the farm survives.

When Adrien needed to plant 200 more trees and convert a building into a workshop, he raised €130,000 from people who wanted to support him. A regional youth-entrepreneur program, Initiative Menton, backed him on top of that. They said it themselves in their video:

We are aware of the difficulty of starting a business in agriculture.

On my visit, Céline was the guide.

A worker walked past us with a 15-kilo box of just-picked fruit balanced on his shoulder, headed up a path. A lemon Adrien grew last year took nine months to ripen and weighed over a kilo. It’s family lore now. I also saw a tree that produces lemons and oranges from the same trunk, grafted together. Two fruits, one root. After touring the orchard, I was treated to a tasting session. Jams, preserves, and liquors, from sweet to tart.

Menton is a town built by people from all over. The Grimaldis from Monaco. The Sardinians. The English in their winter villas. The Italians whose street names still run through the old town. Laurent from Occitanie. Vanessa from Beirut. Almost nothing in Menton was originally Menton.

Nothing continues by accident. Adrien chose to come back. His cousin works in the family’s logistics now too. Younger people are coming into horticulture and want to start their own orchards, Céline told me. The interest is there.

The land prices are the problem.

Menton got very good at turning the lemon into a destination. The festival, the producer network, the chefs, the guided tours. All of it works.

The same tourism economy that gave the Menton lemon an audience has driven the price of farmable terraces high enough that a young person without family money cannot start what Laurent started. The hillside he bought in 1988, with the risk of not getting it back, cannot be bought that way today.

The lemon survives. The next Laurent might not.

Menton hasn’t solved how to make room for the next one. Most destinations haven't started asking who gets to come next, or whether they can afford to stay.

The Menton lemon almost disappeared once. It came back because two people arrived in 1988 and decided to plant it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Walking down from the orchard, I kept thinking about the kilo lemon. Nine months on a branch above the sea. Cut by hand. The whole thing held together by people who decided it was worth doing.

Menton built a brand around a lemon that almost disappeared. The lemon came back because two people arrived in 1988 and planted it. If they were 25 today and walked into the same town with the same idea, they could not afford the hillside.

Most destinations don’t get a second comeback.

More from Destination Sunday

When I stepped off the plane and on to the tarmac, the humidity wrapped around me like a warm, wet blanket. I love that feeling. A baby blue and white Volkswagen bus (a combi), was waiting to take us south along the Cancun-Tulum corridor to Akumal. The combi’s sliding side door was missing and a side of a baby crib acted as a door. One set of the bench seats was removed so dive gear bags could be stacked. I sat on top, I was in charge of the beer. A cooler filled with cervezas bien fria. All of us knocked back beers, including the driver. And I watched the side of the road through the baby crib slats.

The highway 307 (or the carretera) to Tulum was equivalent to a rural road in the US. Far from the likes of the four lanes of today. Driving was certainly the most dangerous part of any trip. No shoulder, and if you catch the edge, it meant a tumble over the edge and into the jungle. And possible death.

The same shitty road into Aventuras Akumal still exists today as you get off the highway.

Our group stayed at a condo on the beach. Gary and I were offered the “crowsnest” a roof-top, palapa covered room. A romantic place for the cute couple. It was there where we were robbed the first night. I wish I could say it was the only time I have been robbed. It was not. The next day, a passport turned up in the shower. Another passport and wallet were gone. The second passport was later found in the jungle.

We took our dive group in that combi with the baby crib door, to the dive sites. Quite literally we would park alongside the road, careful not to topple into the jungle, and trek into the jungle with our gear.

We always asked the land owner for permission to dive. The owners often lived in a palapa with little or no electricity. A coke, or a small package of cookies, or a couple of pesos served as a thank you.

Today many of the cenotes have concrete or wooden stairways leading from the jungle floor to the water. We had barely a path to follow, sometimes jumping from heights to get into the water. Gran Cenote which tour buses frequent, had one single parking space, and a stick ladder to climb out. Each step was strategically placed on the wobbly rungs. One cenote Maya Blue now referred to as Cristalino was an effort for me to climb out of. Slippery rocks, grabbing saplings. My right leg slipped in between two rocks, up to my knee. I fell backwards. Landing on my doubles, on my back. “Is my light ok?”

Cave lights back then were custom-made plexiglass canisters with a battery inside. Crafted in someone’s garage in Florida. Heavy, expensive, and they don’t bounce well. The light survived. My knee, not as lucky.

I hobbled. It was the middle of our trip. I wanted to keep diving. That night I retold the story to our hosts. Someone produced a handful of pain meds. I continued to dive painfree and a wee bit woozy.

The big dive of any trip was to Nohoch Nah Chich, Mayan for the big bird house owned by Don Pedro. Mike Madden has been the primary explorer of the cave system. A couple-kilometer hike into the jungle. Don Pedro’s boys lashed our gear and tanks on to horses as we followed them through the scrubby jungle.

The boys used a rope through a crotch of a tree, as a makeshift pulley. Lowering our gear down to a stick platform at the water’s edge The staging area to set up for the dive. The water was so clear you could see the white calcite dunes and glimpses of the stalactites from the surface.

Returning to Baltimore I went to Johns Hopkins Sports Medicine Center for my knee. Of course the doctor wanted to know how the injury happened. As they were running tests, the attending doctor kept bringing in other staff saying “tell them how you got hurt, tell them,” and they looked at me like I was crazy.

No life altering injury, but my knee aches became a barometer while diving if I was close to getting “bent” (decompression sickness), and if it is going to rain.

And Mike Madden, whose dive shop filled my tanks, less than two years later he became my boss.

Leave a comment

If you're new here, start with this

I worked my way up in the PADI dive certifications and became a dive master for Sea Colony Aquasports. Aside from the general public we also did scuba training for the midshipmen at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Ah, the middies in their summer whites…. Oops I digress. Certification dives were done in a Pennsylvania quarry shadowed by the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant silos. Love check out dives with the middies, yes ma’am, no ma’am.

It was there I met a dive instructor, Gary. I flirted with him over pizza and beer.

Gary and I talked on my commute home from work, almost every night. I had a cell phone, the big box one that sat between the two front seats. In that first month my cellular bill was well over $1200. I would talk about ads I had read about becoming a commercial diver, a merchant marine, or joining the Coast Guard. He shared stories about underwater cave exploration in Belize. Teaching cave diving in Florida. Cave diving. Huh? Never heard of it.

Finally, Gary asked me out on a date. The issue was that I had recently got engaged to a guy in Atlanta. A short-lived engagement, with an ugly ending, for another day.

One night sitting in a booth over dinner, I told Gary diving was number one and he was number two and as long as he understood that, we would get along great.

Weekends spent diving, rock climbing or working on house renovations he had started on his childhood home, where I then lived.

I had found a pair of rusty steel 72 cubic foot tanks in a barn in Virginia. The tanks were visually inspected at the dive shop. Gary offered to teach me how to dive doubles.

Off to the Three Mile Island quarry.

The steel tanks would turn me over on my back like a turtle. Over and over. Fighting each time to right myself.

It was not fun. I was frustrated. Crying in my dive mask. Gary said, “forget it, just get out of the water.” I took his words as dismissive and that pissed me off. I showed him. I fought my way to stay right side up, swam around and stubbornly crawled on my hands and knees on the shore getting out of the water on my own. So there.

I then started learning how to cave dive. I started my training in my rusty 72’s down in Florida, camping at Spring Systems. I was trying to learn the gear and the rules of cave diving. Wrestling my 72’s into the fill station at the end of each dive.

Some guy sat there watching me, grinning, asking about my tanks and if they were new. I looked at him like he was crazy. Telling him to look at the scuffed up paint and rust, no they are not new. Later that evening I learned that guy at the fill station was Sheck Exley, probably the most accomplished cave diver who ever lived.

Sheck was teasing, ME!

I had not finished my certification. Gary and I started running cave diving trips to Mexico anyway in 1990. Mexico. The mecca of cave diving. We stayed in Aventuras Akumal.

An area I did not know was going to become my home.

Leave a comment

Hungry, by the time I reached the village of Comps-sur-Artuby, I was ready for lunch. Comps sits at 900 meters. One of 23 villages spread across this relatively remote stretch of inland Provence. The eastern gateway to the gorges.

It is the kind of place you pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Most people do.

I walked into the Grand Hôtel Bain. A cute place with a terrace with tables. The chef was sitting outside at the table. Lunch service had ended, he said. But I could get a drink, a coffee or a dessert.

The bar area is classic with ceramic beer taps, shelves lined up with bottles, an espresso machine. Not a soul around though.

A woman’s voice came from somewhere in the back, “just a minute”. Standing in the doorway, I was getting a little antsy waiting. Looking up and down the main drag for other options.

Then she appeared, wiping her hands, and told me not to bother with the dessert menu. Go into the dining room, she said. Look in the case.

I did. Passing on dessert, I opted for an Aperol spritz.

Outside at a table on the terrace, the chef sat with a beer and a cigarette. Soaking up the sun with no particular interest in what time it was. A handful of people chatting at a nearby table looked like they were locals. An artisan shop across the street was open, as well as a local TABAC store (a local convenience store). A couple cars passed on the road to the gorge.

She brought my drink. Within seconds I toppled the glass. She waved it off. Then she leaned over cleaning up my mess and suggested the lavender ice cream. Homemade. “Lavender ice cream, ugh” I thought to myself. Yet, I said, sure with a smile, mainly out of guilt for spilling my drink. She returned with the ice cream and a fresh drink. The ice cream was amazing!

And no charge for the spilled drink.

I later discovered: the Bain family has been feeding passers-by at this crossroads since 1727. The hotel as it stands was founded in 1737 by Claude Bain and his wife Marguerite, under the reign of Louis XV. Arnaud Bain is the ninth generation. His son Clément just finished hotel school and is coming back to take over.

Also, the French military swallowed two thirds of this settlement in the 1960s. Building the largest artillery camp in Western Europe. The ancient hamlets are gone. What remains of Comps-sur-Artuby, the 346 people, the hotel, an artisan shop, a TABAC, a restaurant or two on side streets is what survived.

The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the Grand Hôtel Bain as the oldest hotel in the world operated continuously by the same family.

The regional tourism association covers all 23 villages in this territory. They promote a variety of routes, sights, and places to visit. Their info for Comps reads:

“The Templar past of Comps lines the rocky ridges with chapel silhouettes. In the village, life unfolds peacefully with the rhythm of the seasons.”

Two sentences. That’s it!

No mention of the Bain family.

No mention of the world record.

No mention of the woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just have a look for yourself.

They described the landscape and the seasons.

They missed the person, the family story, part of what gives the village life and personality, beyond the view.

This is what so many destinations overlook. Not the gorge. Not the bungee jump off the Pont de l’Artuby. The woman who tells you to ignore the menu, just go have a look. The chef who has nowhere else to be on a Friday afternoon. The ice cream that was worth stopping for. The son who just finished hotel school and chose to come back to a village of 346 people.

Comps-sur-Artuby is not a destination. It is a place. There is a difference.

I am going to be honest with you. Many of you know I lived in Mexico, and I started a company called Loco Gringo. One of the first online reservation services for the Riviera Maya. I sold the company in 2019. And while I was blowing up my life, I decided to sell everything I own, and bought a travel trailer to live in. More details about all that later.

I went back to school for a master’s in travel and tourism for two reasons:

1. With nothing to do, I was afraid I would start having gin for breakfast.

2. I felt like I needed an advanced degree to validate myself and my 27+ years working in tourism and hospitality, while living on a dirt road.

I have a stack of certifications and accolades, all trying to prove something to someone.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love learning and enjoy school.

It took a getaway to the south of France to see it. Since the day I handed the keys to the new owner of Loco Gringo, I have been presenting a sanitized, vanilla version of myself.

Then AI came along.

Being a bit of a geek, I jumped into the deep end of the pool. I built an AI app. Spent a fortune. Shut it down. Tried consulting. Cared more about their businesses than they did. Started writing frameworks on Substack. It was mechanical and unsatisfying.

I have changed my Substack. To share the stories of being an expat, an explorer, and a traveler. A guest and a host. Avoiding potholes in business. And about life held together with duct tape.

If you are a already a subscriber, there will be nuggets of knowledge. You may not recognize the tone though. It’s the real me. No workflows or frameworks. Gritty details of boots-on-the-ground, bruises, and scars from witnessing a civilization grow from the end of a dirt road.

And if you unsubscribe, I understand. There are lots of consultants and people teaching how to promote your property on TikTok. But that person won’t be me.

Buckle up, because sometimes you can’t make this shit up.

Subscribe now

The corner where a lovely bakery used to be is empty now.

I’ve been to Villefranche-sur-Mer three times in the past year. I’m here now. The boulangerie is gone. So is a bank. So is the post office. The town sits on the French Riviera, outside of Nice tucked into limestone cliffs.

A long-time resident called it morte.

Dead.

More homes sit empty most of the year than are lived in full time. The people who keep a town alive, the ones who need a bakery on Tuesday morning, who cash a check at the bank, who mail something at the post office, don’t live here anymore. The people who own here now show up for July and August.

A bakery can’t survive on July and August.

This past week, Villefranche elected a new mayor. Robert Capelier won in a tight second-round vote on March 22. There was a party on Friday night down by the harbour. Anyone was welcome. People showed up hoping he could bring the town back. Housing is his mission.

My rented apartment was a block from the party.

Villefranche isn’t drowning in visitors. Well, at the moment. It’s not on the cover of a travel magazine killing it with foot traffic. It’s not Dubrovnik in July or Amsterdam on any given Tuesday. The boulangerie didn’t close because 400 people showed up and bought out the croissants. It closed because not enough people live there to need it every morning.

That’s a different problem. And it requires a different conversation.

I wrote about destinations becoming more valuable as images than as places, last Sunday. The photo economy. The destination that exists to be photographed rather than lived in. This week is the same root, different wound. When real estate replaces residents, you don’t just lose housing. You lose the daily life that made the housing worth buying.

The people who bought those properties fell in love with the pastries or, the park with an open-air market, the blue of the sea, the way the woman at the post office knew everyone’s name. Then they bought a piece of it. And replaced someone who needed it year-round with a key lockbox and two weeks in July.

They didn’t kill the town on purpose. They hollowed out the exact thing they paid to be near.

Other towns have tried to stop this. None have figured it out.

In 2016, St Ives in Cornwall held a vote. Over three-quarters of voters said yes: stop new homes from being sold as second residences.

The problem is, new builds were only a tiny fraction of the housing stock. The existing homes kept selling to outsiders. Prices kept climbing. Whether the policy failed or was just too small to matter depends on who you ask. Cornwall has since added a 100% council tax premium on second homes. No I did not add an extra zero, 100%.

It took effect last year. Nobody knows yet if it changes anything.

Wales went further. The law now allows council tax premiums on second homes up to an eye-popping 300%. Some counties hit 150% - 200%. House prices dropped. Second homes went on the market.

The bakery didn’t come back.

On the north coast of Northern Ireland, the same thing is happening. In Portstewart, as many as one in four properties are second homes. A lawmaker said what everyone already knew: the towns are dying. Empty streets. No children. No policy yet.

They’re still in the naming-the-problem phase.

And in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The year-round population is roughly 3,500. In summer, it swells to tens of thousands. In Provincetown and on Martha’s Vineyard, workers cycle through partial-year leases because they can’t afford year-round housing. On the Vineyard they call it the Shuffle.

Every destination tried something different.

None of them got the bakery back.

Here’s the bitch.

Some of you reading this are in the tourism industry in a town like this. You run the guesthouse or inn. You take the bookings. You pay attention to your reviews, and you do your job well. And you watch the post office close. You know the family that had to leave. You wave at neighbors you no longer have.

You’re on both sides of this, and you know it.

I’m not telling you to stop. I love tourism; it’s been my career. I’m asking you to count what you’re losing before it shows up in shuttered windows. The thing people come to your destination or town for is the thing that’s leaving. The people are the one thing you can’t replace.

Because the moment worth paying attention to isn’t when the mayor gives a speech, it’s before that, before the bakery closes. Before the post office goes. When you still have something left to fight for instead of something left to eulogize.

I want that corner near the park open again, with pâtisseries in the window.

Leave a comment

Scroll your profile the way someone would who has never heard of your place and is deciding whether to book. One question: what kind of guest do these posts actually attract? Compare that to who you want as guests.

Most places worry about what the internet says about them. The bigger problem is what their own social media is saying, and nobody is checking.

How it happens

You hosted a birthday dinner last spring. Great night, good energy, beautiful photos. You posted them. No caption explaining it was a private event.

Your property bio still says “a peaceful place to disconnect.”

Someone planning a quiet anniversary trip sees the party photos and either books somewhere else, or books with you and arrives expecting a party. They check in. You or your front desk spends the first twenty minutes walking back what your posts promised. That shows up in the review.

I have been doing this since 2007. The party post with no context. That one is mine.

Here is another one. The renovation progress photo you posted because you were proud of it. No context, no dates. A guest booked two weeks later thinking it was finished. It’s not. Or the photo from the local market you sponsored. It looked community-minded. Your bio says serene and private. Now you have a family of six asking about the weekly schedule of events.

You know your property. The guest does not. They are reading your feed like a brochure, taking everything at face value, and drawing conclusions you never intended.

What this costs you

The guest who arrives with the wrong expectation is not just a hard check-in.

They leave a review that describes their version of the experience. That review becomes the script the next guest arrives with, before they ever find your website. They show up already certain about what to expect, based on someone else’s bad stay.

Season after season, the wrong guest trains the next wrong guest. You deal with it every time. Or your front desk does. Either way, it is the same conversation, over and over.

This is not a content problem. It is a trust problem that started the moment you posted without thinking about who was watching.

This week, do this

Spend 15 minutes scrolling your own profile as a stranger. Go to your account. Scroll slowly. Pretend you have never heard of this place and you are deciding whether it is right for your trip.

Look at every post and ask whether it attracts the guest you actually want.

When you sit down to write the confirmation message, add one line that tells them something your social media feed did not. That is it. One line before they arrive is worth more than three conversations at check-in.

Properties that do not post often have the same problem, just concentrated. Ten posts a year means each one carries more weight, not less.

FAQs

A few things you might be thinking

Should I delete the posts that do not fit? Probably not. Post something that adds context to what people already saw. Deleting a post does not undo the impression it made on people who already saw it. Let the feed tell a fuller story rather than hiding the one already out there.

What do you do when your property has multiple vibes, restful during the week and lively on weekends? Say it out loud in your bio. “Weekdays are for people who want to switch off. Weekends we host events. Check our calendar before you book.” A feed that silently shows both without explanation misleads everyone.

What do you do when the confusion is coming from guest tags, content you did not create? You cannot control what guests post, but you control what you amplify. Every time you reshare a tagged post, you endorse that version of your property. Be selective. You can like a photo without sharing it.

Copy-paste AI prompt help

Paste this into whatever AI tool you already use. Add your property description and your last 10 social media posts. For each post, write one line describing what the photo or video shows, then paste the caption.

You are a hospitality consultant who has seen small properties lose bookings because their social media trained the wrong guest to show up.

I will give you two things:

1. A one or two-sentence description of my property and the guest I am trying to attract.

2. My last 10 social media posts. For each one I will write one line describing what the photo or video shows, then paste the caption.

Do three things:

First, describe the guest who would feel most confirmed by this feed. The person who sees these posts and thinks “yes, this place is for me.”

Second, tell me whether that guest matches the property I described. Do not soften this. Name the disconnect.

Third, list any posts that are sending the wrong signal. For each one, write one sentence on what expectation it sets and one sentence on what to post instead.

Output: two short paragraphs for the first two, then a numbered list for the third.

Every mismatched guest leaves a review. That review trains the next one. You wrote the first draft of that problem yourself, which means you can also rewrite it.

This is not just a property-level problem.

It is happening across entire destinations too.

Your visitors arrive pre-trained. Someone else did the training and you had no say in it. They do not show up unsure. They show up certain, and often wrong

Read more

If you stand by the lake in Hallstatt, Austria for a few minutes, you see it play out in real time.

Sightseers move toward the same stretch of waterfront, pause, and raise their phones toward the church steeple and pastel houses reflected in the water. Some scroll first. Checking the angle they saved earlier, then step forward to recreate it.

Hallstatt has fewer than 750 residents, yet millions of people recognize that single view.

People don’t arrive curious anymore. They arrive already decided on what it’s supposed to be.

By the time tourists arrive, they are not discovering the destination. They are confirming the version they saw online.

If you have ever had a guest say, “this isn’t what I expected,” you are already dealing with this.

Expectation is the product now. The experience just delivers on it.

This isn’t a trend. It’s a shift in how travel actually works now.
Travel starts long before booking. What’s changed is who shapes that early experience and what it costs when they get it wrong.

Your visitors arrive pre-trained. Someone else did the training, and you had no say in it.
Guests don’t show up unsure. They show up certain, and often wrong.

Tourism marketing didn’t just miss this. It accelerated it. Destinations have always shown their best side, but those images are now amplified by millions of travelers sharing their own versions of the same place.

Most destinations are still marketing what a place looks like instead of what it’s actually like once you’re there. That’s the problem.

This is a shift from promotion to preparation.
Promotion attracts attention. Preparation shapes behavior.

Most destinations now have two versions: the place itself, and the one people saw online.

Visitors arrive with both in their head.

When Everyone Shows Up for the Same Shot

Hallstatt is one of the clearest examples of this shift. Over the past decade it has become a global social media icon. A small town attracting millions each year. At times the crowds became so intense that officials installed barriers to block the most photographed viewpoint and began limiting tour buses entering the town.

A similar pattern appeared in Roccaraso, a mountain ski resort in Italy’s Abruzzo region. After a TikTok influencer posted videos of the snow-covered slopes, over 10,000 visitors descended on a town of 1,600 residents in a single day. Roads clogged and slopes overcrowded. Day trippers who had paid $20 USD for a tour arrived with no knowledge of ski etiquette, local norms, or the limits of the place they were visiting.

In the United States, the National Park Service has repeatedly reported visitors leaving marked trails to reach photo angles they saw on social media, particularly at places like Horseshoe Bend and Glacier Point in Yosemite. Rangers say most visitors are not trying to cause problems. They are following what they saw online.

What people see online does not just shape where they go. It shapes how they behave when they get there.

Visitors are not exploring. They’re reenacting what they saw, down to where to stand and what to touch. Cues written by someone who was never responsible for the place.

Sometimes those cues ignore boundaries, safety, or local norms. In many cases, visitors arrive having already learned how to behave somewhere from someone who didn’t live there.

They’re not just managing crowds. They’re dealing with behavior that was learned somewhere else, and every viral post trains the next wave before they arrive.

You don’t get a say in what they learned.

The industry spent years optimizing for visibility. Now it’s dealing with the consequences of it.

Where This Hits First: Operators on the Ground

This does not show up first in strategy decks. It shows up in operations.

Hotels, hosts, guides, and tour operators are downstream of content they didn’t create, written by people who don’t run the place, and believed by guests who think they already know what to expect.

Guests arrive expecting walkable distances that aren’t walkable. Quiet viewpoints that are crowded by noon. Access to places that are private, protected, or seasonal.
Staff end up resetting expectations in real time.

You and your team are cleaning up expectations set by people who don’t run the place.

You don’t control what the guest believes. They’re certain they’re right. By the time you step in, the experience is already going off the rails.

When expectations are off, reviews drop, and teams burn out. You see it quickly.

If you don’t shape expectations before arrival, you will spend your entire operation managing the consequences after. The destination story is already breaking before the guest arrives. Local businesses are just the ones absorbing it.

This Changes the Job

Social media has also created real opportunity. Small destinations now have visibility that once required significant budgets, and remote regions can reach global audiences in ways that weren’t possible a decade ago.

But visibility moves faster than infrastructure, planning, or visitor education. That changes what this job actually is.

Marketing is now behavior design, whether you signed up for that job or not. Every piece of content you publish is either teaching people how to behave or letting someone else do it for you.

Marketing, owners, and operators need to be aligned on what the experience actually is before the guest arrives.

Most destinations are still chasing attention. That’s what created the problem. The ones that win shape behavior.

Start with a simple review.

Look at your top-performing content. What is it actually teaching people to do when they arrive? Stand here? Crowd here? Skip everything else?

Show how to experience a place, not just what it looks like on a good day. Point out the local rhythms, boundaries, and tradeoffs before they arrive. Broaden the story beyond one iconic viewpoint, or everyone ends up in the same place.

If this isn’t addressed, the first thing that breaks is the review score. The second is your team. And the local community feels it not long after.

It’s Not Just the Crowds

This goes beyond demand. It’s the gap between the version of the place people see online and the one people actually live in.

Residents aren’t just reacting to crowds. They’re reacting to behavior that doesn’t fit the place, and to a version of their town that no longer feels like theirs. That runs deeper than the crowds, and it doesn’t go away when the season ends.

The Story Is Already Out There

For decades, destinations controlled how their story was told.

Back in 2009, during the economic crisis and swine flu in Mexico, I organized a conference in Cancún. A small group of us were already using early social platforms to show what was actually happening on the ground and push back on travel fears. We wanted to show others what social media could do, and how to use it to show what was really happening.

I told a room full of hotel operators that social media would matter. One woman said her property would never be on Facebook.
Same goal then as now. Get to people before someone else does.

What’s changed is who controls that perception. In the past, destinations shaped how they were seen. Today, that’s often set before they even enter the conversation.

Destinations used to own the story. Now they inherit someone else’s version and try to operate inside it.

The goal isn’t to take control of the story again. It’s to get there earlier.

A single video can introduce millions of people to a place overnight. One angle becomes the angle. One moment becomes the expectation.

So Now What

Social media didn’t change why people travel. It changed where the trip actually begins.

The experience doesn’t start at arrival. It starts the moment someone sees your destination online. People show up with a picture in their head and a way of being there they picked up somewhere else. Sometimes it doesn’t fit at all.

Destinations, hotels, and other businesses are all dealing with the same reality now.

You can shape expectations before people arrive.
Or you can manage the consequences after they do.

Those are the only two options. And one of them compounds the problem every season, because every visitor becomes the next piece of content.

If you’re seeing this play out where you are, I’d love to hear it.
What’s one place where the version online doesn’t match the one on the ground?

Leave a comment

Most of the time, it’s not a price problem.
It happens at the exact moment they were about to trust you.

This week is about fixing that moment, even if your bookings are non‑refundable and your tools are basic.

The second guests decide your site is “the risky option”

A guest:

• Finds you on an OTA

• Clicks through to your website

• Looks at photos and rates, maybe even starts a booking

• Disappears and books on the OTA instead

That’s commission you didn’t have to pay for a guest you already convinced.

It comes down to a pause right before they hit “Pay,” when they think:

“Okay, but what happens if my plans change?”
“And who is actually going to help me if they do?”

On the OTA, the answers are big and loud:

• Clear “non‑refundable” or “flexible” labels

• “Secure payment” badges

• “We’re here 24/7” beside the price

On many small sites, those answers are buried in fine print or not shown at all.

Guests trust OTAs to fix problems.
They’re not sure you will, because you haven’t shown them how.

Why do guests leave a hotel or rental website and book through an OTA instead?

• Because the OTA clearly shows what happens if something goes wrong.

• Most independent sites hide that information or make it hard to find.

• When guests don’t see clear answers, they choose the option that feels safer.

You can’t copy their call centre.
You don’t need to. Guests aren’t looking for a big team. They just want to know a real person will answer.

This week, do this: paste a 3‑line safety block above “Book now”

Goal: finish this in under 5 minutes. If it takes longer, you’re overthinking it.

Step 1 – pick one spot you can actually edit:

• A room page on your site, or

• The short text area right above your booking button, or

• A “Why book direct” block beside your own booking link

Step 2 – if you don’t want to think, use this exactly as it is right above “Book now”:

• Most bookings are non‑refundable once confirmed

• If plans change, tell us early – we’ll do what we can to help

• Direct contact with us – real replies, usually within a few hours

No design. No boxes. No images. Just text.

If you have different seasons and rate types, don’t let that stop you.
Write this for your most common booking, and keep it simple. If you need to, add:

“Some special offers have stricter rules – full details are shown before you pay.”

You have not promised refunds.
You have promised clarity and a human.

If‑then trigger:

If a guest can click “Book,” they should see these 3 lines without scrolling. If they can’t, move the block until they do.

If you haven’t pasted this yet, do it now before you read on.

What makes a direct booking feel safe to a guest?

Three things:

• Clear rules about changes or cancellations

• Clear timing for when payment is taken

• A clear way to contact a real person if something goes wrong

Fix the one email every guest reads (highest‑ROI move)

If you only do one thing from this newsletter, do this.

Open your confirmation email. The first screen on a phone should say:

“Your stay with us on [dates] is confirmed. We’re expecting you.

Most bookings are non‑refundable once confirmed. If your plans change, tell us as early as you can. We can’t promise a refund, but we’ll do what we can to help with new dates or options.

If anything comes up, reply to this email or message us at [channel]. A real person on site replies, usually within a few hours.”

If guests often ask about payment timing, swap in this line:

“Payment is taken at [booking / before arrival], you’ll see this clearly before you pay.”

Clear rules don’t just help guests feel safer.
They protect your time, your team, and your sanity when something goes wrong.

Ten‑minute upgrade: borrow the words, not the badges, from your OTA page

If you have 10 more minutes, do this next.

Look at your OTA page for one reason: it shows safety clearly where guests decide.

1. Open your main OTA listing in one tab and your own site in another.

2. On the OTA, note the words near the price that calm people down:

   • “Non‑refundable” / “Free cancellation”

   • “Secure payment”

   • Any short line about help if things go wrong

3. Ask: “Which of these do I also offer, but never say on my own site?”

Don’t worry about badges, icons, or layout.
Just focus on clear words next to the price.

Add one or two simple lines under your 3‑line block, for example:

• “Secure card payment processed by [provider].”

• “We’ve hosted [X] stays since [year].”

• A short review line: “Guests say: ‘Exactly as described, no surprises.’”

You’re showing you’re not a gamble.

Use AI to tighten your wording

If you don’t want to reword this yourself, use AI:

“You are helping a small short‑term rental, B&B, or hotel make its direct booking feel safe by clearly explaining:
– what happens if plans change
– when payment is taken
– how a guest can contact a real person for help

I will paste:
– the text from my booking page
– my current confirmation email

Step 1: Extract the exact sentences that explain:
– what happens if plans change
– when the card is charged
– how guests can contact us

Step 2: Rewrite the content into:

A 3‑line safety block to place above a ‘Book now’ button
– exactly 3 lines
– each line under 15 words
– clear, plain language
– no promises beyond what is stated

A new opening paragraph for the confirmation email
– fits on the first screen of a phone
– clearly confirms the booking
– clearly explains rules and contact method

Writing rules:
– use simple, direct language
– avoid marketing phrases, filler words, or generic reassurance
– do not sound like a corporate hotel brand
– only include statements the operator can realistically deliver

Output format:
– ‘Safety block:’ followed by the 3 ready‑to‑paste lines
– ‘Confirmation email opening:’ followed by the ready‑to‑paste paragraph

If key details are missing, ask one clarifying question before writing.”

Let it draft, then adjust the wording so it sounds like you and matches your real rules.

What happens if you actually do this

Over the next 2–3 weeks, you should see:

• Fewer confused messages: less “I didn’t know it was non‑refundable” and “Just checking my booking…”

• Fewer refund fights, because guests saw the rules and a human promise in plain language up front.

• More guests who start a booking on your site actually finishing it there, instead of bouncing back to an OTA tab.

That means fewer 15–25% commission hits on bookings you could have kept,
and more control of the guest relationship from the start.

You don’t need a spreadsheet. Just notice for two weeks:

• How often do you hear “I didn’t know…”

• How often does someone who starts on your site ends up booking on an OTA

If both start to drop, this is working.

Guests book where fear is removed fastest.
In practice, that means showing clear rules, clear payment timing, and a clear human contact before they pay.