Resilience and adaptation: The impact of the cost of living crisis on the UK's travel industry

What a thrill to journey by train to St Moritz in the snowy Swiss Alps to see the work of Gerhard Richter (born in 1932), the German painter who critics describe as our “greatest living artist.” His works can be found in international collections and have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Europe and the United States. He’s also the most expensive European living artist (his abstract painting Abstraktes Bild (599) sold for a record $46.3 million at Sotheby's in London). While Richter’s paintings are highly covetable, collectors visiting his new three-venue exhibition in the Swiss Alps must be content with simply viewing the works as none are for sale.

“Once upon a time, the planets and the fates and all the stars aligned..." — Taylor Swift

With busy airports, full flights and the ending of most travel restrictions, 2023 marked a return to travel, mostly as we knew it before the pandemic began. Nearly every peak travel period in 2023 broke air travel records, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. An estimated record-breaking 4.7 billion people are expected to travel in 2024, according to the International Air Transport Association.

The first surprise is that a half-hour trip by train from Edinburgh to North Berwick is really as far as you need to go for a taste of Scotland that is elemental and remote, a place of windswept beaches, stunning coastal walks and panoramic views. The West Coast and the Highlands may be more extreme, but then so is the journey to get there. This, by contrast, is an easier but no less enjoyable adventure.

There’s a joke in certain circles, that whenever something goes wrong in Paris, we blame Emily. I think you know of whom I speak.

In some parts of Europe, high prices and Christmas markets go hand in hand. But in others, this year’s soaring costs have come as a shock.

Consider Gold List the answer to the question our editors get asked more than any other: What are your favorite places to stay? Our 30th annual iteration of the world’s greatest hotels and cruises captures nearly a year’s worth of work: This collection of 75 resorts and hotels represents hundreds of hours of researching, scouting, and impassioned debating by our team of editors in seven cities across the globe. But more than that, it reflects our ongoing love affair with the places where we stay, which often become our gateways to entire destinations. Read on to inspire your next trip.

“Our goal is not to replace our workers, but rather empower them to make them more productive so they can automate certain tasks and focus on providing more value to our customers,” explains Adrian Lopez, who recently stepped into a newly created role as Head of AI for Corporate at Flight Centre Travel Group(FCTG).

The aroma of a tapas bar is an incongruous sensation when dressed in ski kit, but it’s the end of a long day on the slopes, and plates of grilled squid, spicy patatas bravas and plump green olives are on offer, along with a bargain glass of Rioja (€3.50/£2). It’s 6pm and the lifts have only just shut in Sierra Nevada, Europe’s most southerly ski resort. The mountain town in Andalusia enjoys lots more sunshine than most ski areas in the Alps. This, admittedly, is accompanied by a fairly functional assortment of accommodation spread along a steeply winding road. Unless you’re staying right in town, walking home while carrying your kit takes quite an effort at this altitude. The resort’s hub, Pradollano, sits at 2,100 metres, while the ski area’s 65 miles of pistes extend up to 3,398 metres: the chilly summit of Veleta, Spain’s third-highest mountain. 

I'd seen images of baby Krishna atop a banyan leaf in pop devotional art posters all over India. Yet it was only on a dusty lane in Jaipur's Old City that I witnessed the leaf of the banyan tree deliver something divine in person. “That's outstanding,” said Chintan Pandya as he tasted a piece of kesar pista makhan—a seemingly simple bar of saffron-tinted butter topped with bits of crushed pistachio—picked off the dried leaf. “No…mind-blowing.” Licking his fingers, America's most acclaimed Indian chef passed the bar to me. “Here, use your hands.”

To reach the top of the Waldspritz sledding run above the village of Grindelwald in the Swiss Alps, I hiked 90 minutes into the backcountry, dragging a small runnered sled by a rope to roughly 7,400 feet.

In the historic streets of Trieste, an often overlooked town on Italy’s Istria peninsula, there is an aroma of coffee in the air. Dating back to the early 18th century, when the tax on coffee beans arriving at its port was waived, the city has had a deep association with coffee and was the main entry point for coffee beans into Europe. In the historic centre, visitors can still find some of the original coffee houses, modelled on those found in Vienna at the time and, each year, the city hosts the Trieste Coffee Festival.