“Namaste. In India we never say goodbye, we say hope to see you again.”
Travel
Hunkering down in paradise with the horn-eyed ghost crabs
If the crabs – carefully protected here by man as well as themselves – don’t want company, neither do you. This is a place to simply let go, to feel the weight of mental pressure and physical tiredness dissolve.
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Travel
Sipping a botanical journey across Vietnam and talking Trinity in Ho Chi Minh City
I don’t so much have a bee in my bonnet as a whole hornets’ nest about the lack of Sense of Place in most airport retail offers. The SASCO shop shows what can be done with investment, imagination and a real understanding of a culture and its associated crafts and products.
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Airports
Mastering the perfect serve with Aperol Spritz
The perfectly served Aperol Spritz inspired me to play this lovely passing shot straight out of the Carlos Alcaraz handbook {Note: No passengers were harmed in the making of this photograph}.
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Airports
Up, up and away again in 2024
Ben was doing what all good airport commercial managers should do, spending time on the shop floor, watching, evaluating. What’s working. What’s not.
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Travel
No L, No L – A very British Christmas carol
“No, it’s ok, I’m getting off at Cardiff, and it’s actually easier for me to stand,” the mother replied unconvincingly as she swayed stoically in a carriage resembling a human club sandwich.
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Travel
Finding triumphant evidence of Merriam-Webster’s word of the year at Qatar Duty Free
Now here’s what you call a driving force in airport retail. About the only thing that can stop (fortunately) Qatar Duty Free Senior Vice President Thabet Musleh is the brake on his buggy.
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Travel
Up close with the Masters of Time and landing a big Hennessy scoop
Oh dear, I don’t think Bovet 1822 will be calling for my CV just yet…
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Airports
Spell it backwards or forwards, wow is wow
“We have one of the best buildings, I would say, of any airport in the world. We want to create a passenger experience matching exactly to that status.” And that is precisely what is taking shape at Terminal A.
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Travel
Typecast at Hong Kong Airport with a beautiful reminder from Hermès
For month upon miserable month through the pandemic, HKIA resembled a cross between a ghost town and a military hospital. You could almost sense the tumbleweed about to blow along the arrivals hall. How good it is to see the place humming once more.
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Events
Sunrise in Shanghai, tenderness in Tokyo; and the cream of the crop with Sōmrus
I’m up, up and away again on one of those aircraft, on a 16-hour, 8,045 mile flight to New York, the first leg of a two-week journey that will in six days hence see me in Cannes for the TFWA World Exhibition.
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Travel
Meeting a guardian angel called Maki at Tokyo Station
For a moment prospects of recovering my laptop seemed between slim and none. And slim, like my train, had just left town.
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Travel
Back in HEL’s kitchen and bound for Hong Kong
But my life, my wife and my heart are in Hong Kong these days and I am looking forward to an extended stint living out of my home rather than out of a suitcase.