January Travel News
Hi from Rick: Kicking Off 2026 Travels
We're throwing our 2026 Travel Festival — a five-night series of free and information-packed webinars from January 12 to 16, designed to get your travel dreaming in focus for the upcoming season. No overblown hype…just solid lessons from experience.
Overblown hype? Yep. It can be a trip-buster.
I can remember way back in 2001, when tourism to the British countryside was devastated by a fear of foot-and-mouth disease. While this was a serious concern for cows, pigs, sheep, and other creatures with cloven hooves, overhyped reporting caused many people — none of whom had cloven hooves — to cancel their trips to England out of fear. (To combat this, I did a highly publicized tour of British farms…and survived!)
A quarter century later, clickbait journalism continues to impact travel dreams when it shouldn't. Last year, headlines about anti-tourism protests in Europe created lots of travel anxiety and scuttled many a trip. Nervous Americans didn't realize that these protests were explicitly aimed at "bad tourism"… Read more
