For those of you who travel like I do know the airport boarding process all too well. It feels like zones 1 through 1500 board first, and by the time you finally get on, the overhead bins are already full, let us not forget about the person greeting you who always has a smile, but the only thing missing, I think, is the high five! Well after that, there is also the famous final boarding call, where your luggage will be removed in the next 5.6 milliseconds if you’re not at the gate yet. I’m never part of that final call, yet it still gives me anxiety.
Well, when it comes to holiday space, we’re at that final boarding call too. Now, you’re likely asking why we’re even mentioning this. Here’s a trend we’re seeing that’s worth sharing: we track buyer behavior monthly, with data dating back 16 years. Over a 12-month period, this behavior shifts 9 times, making projections part art, not all science. This year, something peculiar has been happening, which we anticipated as a possibility a year ago. While long-term bookings are up, last-minute requests for the festive season have started as expected. For obvious reasons, there was a slight pause in plans for this season, which is understandable. That pause now seems to be over, so we wanted to share a video showcasing where we’re finding 11th-hour availability. Destinations range from parts of Peru to Egypt to Kenya to Sri Lanka to Guatemala.
One of the many amazing things I’ve seen our team do is their ability not only to find availability when it seems impossible but to make even the most last-minute reservations come to life. They find the proverbial needle in the haystack while ensuring that quality and product integrity remain our primary focus, as always.
Enjoy the video, and remember—34 days left until the festive period. This is your final boarding call…
Connecting the Dots;
Last year, my colleague Gisela went in-depth through Bolivia and loved it. Who wouldn’t? Most people only explore the lake or the salt flats, however as a self-admitted history buff, diving into the history is what drew me in, especially around the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet where I connected the dots, quite literally, was in the astronomy in the Uyuni Salt Flats.
While attending university, I was considered a vector calculus nerd who loved astronomy and the math around tracking planetary movements (including the pinky rule). Now you have to understand studying in Tucson at UofA in those times was all about astronomy and still is today. The world’s largest telescope by diameter which still sits atop a peak in Chile among other places, was built during my freshman year and the honeycomb concept used to build the mirror from polished aluminum was pure genius. Every time I gaze at the celestial skies above the Uyuni, I find myself in front of that telescope, as if I have been teleported into the past, right to my sophomore year when I got to get a view of Jupiter’s moons through one of those huge telescopes. I could not believe the clarity, and it’s almost as if I could see those moons again looking at the sky above those flats.
In one of our team’s images of the night sky above Bolivia, I saw a glimmer of the Martian planet using my old textbooks and equations and a trusted app on planetary movements to verify that it was in fact Mars above Bolivia at that very date and just like that…I jumped into the past in university, talking to a few members of our ultimate frisbee team that worked on the rover that traversed the Martian surface in a joint project with several other prominent universities called the Pathfinder project. In a single moment, I traveled back in time to elementary school and a voluntary project I did in 3rd grade on the surface of Mars because I dreamed of being an astronaut after seeing my very first shuttle launch on TV that year, what great memories those were.
To this day, Bolivia takes me back to a time when I found my love for astronomy, which is the only subject that rivals my passion for history.
What will it do for you? Enjoy this week’s video.
