Meet a 26-year-old concierge at a five-star hotel in Australia who caters to the absurd requests of wealthy travelers

When German teacher Richard Schirrmann converted a former classroom to accommodate young travellers on a budget in 1909, no one could have predicted the global movement he would inspire. Three years later, Schirrmann bought a castle near Dortmund to establish the world’s first youth hostel and by the 1920s, Germany had 2,000 low-cost hostels dotted around its rural areas. But it wasn’t until a group of Brits brought the idea back to the UK and launched the Youth Hostels Association (YHA) in 1930 that the new movement gained its poster child.

In the waters beneath Sydney’s iconic opera house, an artificial reef is thriving. The five-year-old addition, which now hosts the endangered White’s seahorse, is joined by newly-planted seagrass meadows, kelp forests, and hundreds of living sea walls, all of which are helping to bring biodiversity back to Sydney Harbor. Both below and above the water's surface, the city—the country’s most populous and most-visited—is taking big steps toward sustainability.

The threat of travel disruption feels imminent for anyone heading to the airport nowadays, especially with cancellations and delays making headlines repeatedly over the summer. While anger about such disruptions regularly fills social media channels, passengers have come to expect problems.A new report from ground transport provider CMAC, based on a survey of more than 1,000 travelers in the United Kingdom who booked round-trip flights, found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believed that flight disruptions have worsened. And 78% of those surveyed reported having experienced a flight disruption themselves. That’s not terribly surprising, given that 650 million hours of collective passenger time was wasted in 2022 as a result of flight disruptions, according to passenger compensation platform AirHelp. For its report, AirHelp used structured calculation logic to determine the impact of flight disruptions based on data, expert interviews and its internal expertise.

The ‘golden horseshoe’, an otherworldly image of a rare golden tri-spine horseshoe crab accompanied by a trio of golden trevallies fish, has been chosen as the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2023 competition.

Australia’s award-winning expedition travel company, Aurora Expeditions, has announced that its voyagers now have access to enhanced connectivity following the rollout of Space X’s Starlink aboard two of its purpose-built ships, the Greg Mortimer and Sylvia Earle.

Bain Capital-owned Virgin Australia said on Tuesday that the airline returned to a profit for the first time in 11 years for fiscal 2023, buoyed by a strong recovery in travel demand following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Once mainly visited by volunteers, aid workers and backpackers on a budget, Guatemala has now made it onto the radar of trendsetters and Hollywood stars.

Tom Robinson, 24, attempted to become the youngest person to row across the Pacific Ocean, but his dream was unfortunately deferred. 

In the Barossa Valley, Seppeltsfield has several significant updates in the pipeline, most notably the property’s new six-star hotel: Oscar Seppeltsfield. Developers are planning to break ground in late 2023/early 2024; the new A$50m luxury hotel will boast 71 rooms across 12 storeys, creating what’s been referred to as ‘a Sydney Opera House for the Barossa’. In the meantime, the winery is busy transforming its historic cellars beneath the cellar door into a new tasting room, with works due for completion by end of October 2023.

Whether you want unique interior design, world-beating food, incredible value or simply a chance to escape the world for a day or two, you’re guaranteed a memorable stay at every one of our 42 winners and runners-up.

A new COVID variant has sparked a rise in hospitalisations and prompted governments to bring forward booster vaccines.

It’s almost impossible to understate the allure of the Amazon.