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.
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.
I have another experience to share where a hotel got it right. An earthquake in Peru caused a rock slide on the train that take passengers from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Caliente to see Machu Picchu. I only have one extra day to spare in Peru, so I needed the tracks to be cleared and the train to run the next day or I would miss the iconic site. I was a bit stressed and also had to find a place to say.
There is a hotel directly at the train station. My wife and I spoke in fragmented English/Spanish with the hotel and ended up booking to spend the night in the hopes that we could catch the early train the following morning. I had a lot of plans that needed to be changed, and needed internet. The hotel went out of their way to provide me internet access before we even booked a room. Once booked, the clerk sent ice cream to our room. It was a small gesture, but one I haven't forgotten.
We had dinner in their restaurant that night and felt like they were a lifeline when things started going sideways. The tracks were cleared and we made it to MP the following day. But one clerk at a hotel made what was otherwise a stressful day into a memorable experience.