How Your Trip May Be Impacted By the Hotel Worker Strike

Sep 7, 2024 • 7 min read

Travelers hoping to escape the coming cold weather can save big on a trip south of the equator thanks to Air New Zealand’s latest sale that has roundtrip flights from the United States starting at less than $800.

If you’re flying through San Francisco International Airport any time soon, keep your eyes peeled for the most adorable member of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Barni, a 5-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer, was just officially crowned the TSA’s Cutest Canine.

The Olympic Games in Paris generated a lot of excitement around the cleanup project of the Seine River, where triathlon and swimming competitions took place. And there’s more to come: Mayor Anne Hidalgo plans to open three public swimming spots on the Seine by next summer, and similar projects are in the works in Boston, London and Amsterdam.

Silicon Valley's favorite festival, Burning Man, was hit by a massive dust storm that messed up travel plans for tens of thousands of its participants.

Airbus is months away from launching its brand-new narrowbody jetliner, the A321XLR.

Thousands of hotel workers are on strike across the country, demanding better wages and workloads and a reversal of COVID-19-era cuts.

Koji, the mold that transforms soy beans and wheat into soy sauce and rice into sake, is so beloved in Japan that it has its own holiday. And lately, chefs have been finding new uses for the fungus, which has a fruity aroma and an ability to make “anything it touches better,” says Jeremy Umansky, 41, the owner of Larder deli in Cleveland. He uses koji for almost everything: to cure pastrami; to ferment Chinese-style black beans, which are ground and swirled into chocolate babka to embolden the chocolate; and to sprinkle over salads and fries in the form of what the restaurant calls Special K, a seasoning of dried ground koji. “It’s a harmonizer,” he says. Bartenders, too, are taking note. At Nancy’s Hustle in Houston, the bar manager, Zach Hornberger, 32, adds it to the nonalcoholic Silver Brining cocktail, a sweet-sour-salty mix of pickle brine, grapefruit and lime juices, koji and tonic. “It brings this umami background to beverages, and it plays well with citrus, taming the high acid notes and rounding the drink as a whole,” he says. At the restaurant Fête in Honolulu, the bar manager, Fabrice McCarthy, 41, infuses rum with shio koji (a slurry of koji, water and salt) and shakes it into a mai tai to add salinity — the effect, he says, is similar to how salted peanuts make you want to drink more beer. Ryan Chetiyawardana, 40, the owner of the bar Lyaness in London, experiments with koji in multiple forms — for one cocktail, he ferments parsnips with koji, which he says unlocks the sweetness and delivers “a huge tropical brightness.” While koji often plays a supporting role, at Paradiso in Barcelona, it wraps around the entire lip of the glass used for the Fleming, named for Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, another influential mold. For this fungus-inspired cocktail, which includes grapefruit, tequila and miso, the manager of Paradiso’s research lab, Matteo Ciarpaglini, 30, one-upped a classic salt rim with a fluffy cloud of koji, its floral fragrance accompanying every taste. —

Few industries were disrupted as drastically by the Covid pandemic as the hospitality sector. Now, as travel has bounced back to prepandemic highs and Covid precautions have fallen by the wayside, thousands of hotel workers say they are still suffering from the lower wages and higher workloads that the pandemic period ushered in.

Nestled below California's Laguna Mountainis Campo, a small unincorporated community that Deborah Jean Peck calls home.

Welcome back to our Saturday edition, a roundup of our best lifestyle reads. If you have to choose one supplement to benefit your overall health, make it creatine. Although it's been around since the '90s, it's exploded recently — and for good reason.

Melissa Dewalt caught the travel bug a decade ago when she drove from her home state of Pennsylvania across the country to California to visit her then-boyfriend. She then road-tripped north to Seattle.