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The Ritz-Carlton New York Battery Park/Oyster When you walk through a hotel with its General Manager, the staff snaps to attention: Surfaces are wiped, pillows are fluffed, postures are straightened, and smiles are widened. GMs are the ringmasters of hotels, spending their careers zeroing-in on and addressing any problems you could possibly encounter on your…
A destroyed building in Road Town. When my patio door flew off, I knew it was all over. First, it felt like a game. I dutifully stocked up on bottled water and canned ham, latched my hurricane shutters, and remembered all of those evening newscasts I watched about folks in the tropics nailing plywood over…
Sheikh-Lotfolloah Mosque in Esfahan; Photo by Chris Nielsen Chances are, when you tell people that you’ve booked an exotic trip of a lifetime, and that it’s not a safari in Africa or island hopping in Thailand, but Iran, you might be faced with a rapid-fire line of questions and comments that express surprise, confusion, or…
I’d spent two weeks in Rio Dulce, the yachting capital of Guatemala, and all I wanted to do was get out. Masha, the Russian-Canadian kiteboarder, agreed. “I feel so claustrophobic there,” she said. Decked out in mesh anti-mosquito pants, she helped her boyfriend, Jim, strike sail on his 28-foot Beneteau named Chakra. “And I think…
You know that feeling when you’re on vacation — pina colada in one hand, beach read in the other — and you think to yourself “I wish I could stay here forever”? Well, Lina and David Stock, the husband-and-wife team behind Divergent Travelers, took the road less traveled and turned that familiar fantasy into their…
Many lust after the idea of traveling full-time — of swapping their cramped cubicle for a nomadic lifestyle — but Alexandra Creange, a New Jersey native, is one of the lucky few who actually get to call globetrotting her 9-to-5 gig and the world her office. A frequent flier, Creange has visited the beaches of…
At Oyster, we’re always hearing interesting tidbits from our investigators visiting hotels around the globe — which helps us keep a close watch on developing travel trends. This year, it has been super clear that what is happening in the news geopolitically — from acts of terror to political upsets — is going to have…
The beach at Abaka Bay Resort, on Ile-a-Vache. In Mumbai, travelers can take tours of the Dharavi slums. Guidebooks for Rio de Janeiro have been recommending guided walks through the mountainside favelas for years now. And every day in northern Thailand, busloads of tourists from Chiang Mai roll into villages inhabited by Kayan tribespeople, where…
Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Flickr The road to Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States has been anything but smooth. Trump’s controversial campaign was rife with scandal (the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump University fraud case), and fueled by rhetoric around banning Muslims from the country as well as…
On a September evening in 1951, William S. Burroughs misjudged his aim while attempting a drunken party trick, shooting his wife dead. The previous year, the couple had moved to Mexico City to wait out a five-year statute of limitation on a New Orleans drug charge against Burroughs. It was during this time that, at…