LGBTQ+ travelers: High-spending adventurers seek inclusive experiences

They are scenes straight out of a travel nightmare: Airline passengers, including unaccompanied minors, stranded for days in strange cities amid a cascading wave of flight cancellations—with little hope of catching a plane home in a hurry.

American Airlines CEO Robert Isom outlined numerous steps the airline is taking to “course correct” after abandoning a direct distribution strategy it embarked on in 2023.

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts said Thursday that its recent technology investments have helped keep profits flowing to the bottom line, even as traveler demand for the hotel group’s core economy segment moderates.

A few places immediately come to mind when it comes to LGBTQ+ travel—whether it’s New York’s historic Greenwich Village or Buenos Aires’ bustling Palermo District, Berlin’s underground Schöneberg or London’s nightclub-packed Soho. But Asia is featuring more frequently on travel itineraries that engage with queer communities around the world, thanks to a rising global visibility of what’s at the forefront of queer entertainment and culture on the continent. From the electrifying drag scene in Manila to the societal recognition of trans identities in Kathmandu, these Asian cities give dimension to celebrating queerness in all its global forms.

If you were flying — or planned to fly — last week, your travel plans might have been snarled by an I.T. outage that kneecapped myriad industries and critical services worldwide. On Friday, July 19, alone, nearly 14 percent of the scheduled flights in the United States were canceled and 56 percent were delayed, according to Cirium, an aviation data company. In the days following, Delta Air Lines and other carriers continued to cancel and delay flights as they struggled with crews and planes out of position and the rebooking of thousands of passengers.

Planning the perfect girls getaway can be challenging — deciding on a destination, activities and accommodations everyone will enjoy is no small feat.

Selina Hospitality, a hotel and experiences brand focused on youth travelers, said Monday it “no longer has any reasonable prospects of avoiding an insolvency.”

The National Parks, despite efforts to highlight LGBTQ heritage, have long felt like the domain of a homogenous set of travelers. National Park Service efforts to change this image have had mixed results—a number of Pride events in parks have received backlash and even boycotts from those they claim to celebrate. But visibility matters, especially in places long typified as straight, able-bodied, and white—and that’s where folks like Dusty Ballard and Mike Ryan come in.

It was the content update nobody needed. When cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike issued an update to systems throughout the world running Microsoft Windows, scheduled to take place overnight from Thursday to Friday, those systems crashed. The result has been a tangled web of canceled and delayed flights, among numerous other business disruptions.

A global Microsoft outage disrupted IT systems around the world on Friday, canceling over a thousand US flights and delaying hundreds more. As a result, major US airlines including American Airlines, United, and Delta requested global ground stops on all flights Friday morning, per the FAA. As of 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, there were 1,692 canceled flights from US origins, out of 3,861 flights cancelled globally, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

When we talk about traveling the world, we often speak exclusively of the earth’s surface: the number of countries visited, borders crossed, cities surveyed.

Travel credit cards are hotter than ever, with over 41% of Americans having a card that provides travel rewards.  However, with many cards offering lounge access, statement credits, and travel insurance, some cards' annual fees have climbed to nearly $700 a year.