‘Magic that will inspire never-ending travels’: readers’ favourite places in Turkey

If there was ever a tale of two cities it has to be Kaş and Kalkan. Both picturebook pretty, with cobbled streets and bougainvillea-draped old stone houses, the two became hugely popular with holidaying Britons in Antalya when mainstream tourism began to gather pace there in the early 1990s.

At airports around Europe, particularly those with flights to and from Istanbul, it’s not uncommon to see men, their heads freshly shaved — some wearing caps intended to cover red scabs, others wearing forehead bands to prevent postoperative swelling — and all showing the unmistakable signs of recent hair transplant operations.

This series of articles about credit cards, points and miles, and budgeting for travel is brought to you in partnership with The Points Guy.

Set in central Turkey’s otherworldly Cappadocia region, this year’s iteration of the Echoes From Agartha festival continued to tell its elusive story. The festival is based on the mythical underground city of Agartha, said to have housed the survivors from Atlantis for thousands of years.

With every terror attack that grips the world, we all pause to reflect. World travelers and frequent flyers, however, likely react a little differently: People with upcoming adventures abroad tend to follow the news more closely, start researching travel insurance, and keep tabs on safety alerts.

Emirates has announced it will reduce service between Dubai and almost half its destinations in the U.S. Flights to Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles will be reduced from two per day to one, and daily flights to Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale will be reduced to five per week each. The total number of weekly flights cut comes to 25.

Conde Nast Traveler gets a lot of mileage out of its annual Readers’ Choice Awards, slicing and dicing feedback from 300,000 travelers into a dizzying array of categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories. Not only is there a ranking of the best cities in the world, there’s also the best small cities in the U.S. The world’s best hotels, sure. But also the top 10 hotels in Europe, and in Northern Asia, and in Eastern Mexico, and in Florence.

Although the shocking passenger-bashing incidents at American and United have mostly upstaged the laptop ban story in recent weeks, another media-focus turnaround may be in the offing.

The U.S. and Turkey are engaged in an escalating war of words and visa regulations, and travelers are caught in the middle.

The folks at Travelex, the foreign-exchange giant, recently published a list of the destinations where £500 (currently, $674 USD) would last the longest. Although the list targeted British travelers, the figures should work out about the same for travelers from North America, with roughly $700 in mind.

By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard that Thomas Cook Group, the British travel operator—which encapsulates retail travel agencies, wholesale tour packagers, and even airlines—has shuttered under bankruptcy. This is the largest tour operator failure in not-so-recent memory; it’s left some 600,000 travelers stranded at their foreign destinations, and many tour buyers who haven’t started their trips yet are unlikely to see the tours they bought or any money they prepaid. The issue raises the question: What happens to customers when a tour operator they paid shuts down; are there any legal guarantees of reimbursement? The short answer: only for some people.

American citizens are pretty fortunate in terms of passport power, but your little blue booklet may not be quite as powerful as you think. The list of countries that require visas for Americans includes some travel hotspots, for example Australia, Brazil, Cuba, and China.