One morning in Vienna, walking past the wall of the Bruno-Marek-Hof, I stopped in front of that quietly mocking drawing. The world’s tallest buildings were lined up: Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101, Petronas, Empire State… And on the far right, almost flush against the ground, a tiny little stub: “This building.” Vienna had dared to place its own modesty on the same chart as the world’s grandeur. I smiled. Then a single sentence came to my mind:
“Trying to extract the most you possibly can out of a journey is exactly what can ruin it.”
I have been in the travel industry for thirty-five years. I run FEST Travel, and I have seen many countries; I have ridden the Trans-Siberian, the Rovos Rail, and the most distant corners of the world. And here is what I can say: what wears down today’s traveller is not distance – it is their own appetite. The trap of wanting to see everything.
Travellers often confess this to themselves quietly: “I want to do it all. I want to see all of it, complete all of it, put a tick next to all of it.” But this is not the right path.
That sentence sums up the greatest illusion the travel industry has produced in the past twenty years: the illusion that going to a city is the same thing as “consuming” it. If you have gone to Rome, the Vatican, the Colosseum, the Trevi, the Forum, the Borghese, the Pantheon – all of it must be on the list. Nine museums in three days. Half an hour for Caravaggio, ten minutes for Bernini, five minutes for the photograph. At dinner, taking off your shoes in the hotel room, the only thing you are trying to remember is: which bridge did I cross today? Or what did I miss?
The most a journey can give you only emerges when you stop trying to extract it. Saying this is perhaps not in the interest of a travel agency, but it is the truth.
Some travellers speak of a more radical step: “When I travel, I now turn my phone into a brick. I make it into a dumb phone; everything is forbidden. That way, I do not fill the in-between moments with unnecessary news or interactions that mean nothing. I connect far more with what is real.”
And then the line that lands:
“The in-between moments are the whole point.”
Reading that line, I thought back to my last evening before flying back to Istanbul. I was walking through the Naschmarkt. In front of me, a street musician was playing the violin – a Balkan melody I had never heard in Turkey. I stopped and listened for a few minutes. I did not photograph it. I did not Shazam it. I did not add it to an Instagram story. I just listened. Those three minutes left more in me than the entire visit to Schönbrunn that day. Because those three minutes were in between. They were unplanned. They could not be measured. They were not recorded – and that is precisely why they stayed with me.
You Are Not Buying a Place. You Are Buying Time.
Let us go one step further: “When you spend money on something, what you are really buying is the empty space inside yourself. The empty space on your calendar – for yourself, for those around you. To learn something, to teach yourself, to reconnect with your senses, to reconnect with the people around you. You are buying the right to choose the slow road.”
As the manager of a travel agency, I would like to repeat this sentence to my team every morning. Because what we have ever truly sold has never been an airline ticket, a hotel reservation, or a museum entrance pass. We sell time. We sell that pocket of emptiness in which our guests are pulled away from their phone, their email, the meetings on their calendar, and their child’s school WhatsApp groups. And the more that pocket is protected, the more value the journey carries.
If a guest of ours has spent seven days on the Trans-Siberian watching the Siberian steppe through the window — and during those seven days has not joined a single conference call, has not opened a single Excel sheet – then those seven days are the seven days that will keep returning to them for the rest of their life.
Small Honesties
It is not the grand things that define a place. Contrary to what you might think, what you really notice is the floor tiles, the light switch, the ceiling… In a funny way, more than the view, these are the markers of a place’s soul and its design.
I resisted this idea for years – then I surrendered. Because it is true. When I came back from Copenhagen, what stayed with me was not the colourful houses of Nyhavn but the local crowd at the little coffee place near our apartment, and the smell of the wood in the stairwell. From Vienna, not the Klimts at the Belvedere but the bookbindings in the National Library. From Tokyo, not the Imperial Palace, but the sound of the automatic door of the convenience store at the corner of the street where we stepped out each morning.
A place catches you not through its grand promises but through its small honesties. The job of a good travel designer is to keep their guest open to those small, honest moments – not to present them as a list, but simply to make room for those moments to come.
The Journey, Not the Arrival
Without tension, there is no triumph. By the time you arrive, you realise the point was the journey – never the place you were trying to reach. The point was not to arrive. The point was to live.
Every journey is measured not by where you arrive but by what you leave along the way. Today, the travel industry sells not what is left along the road but the photographs taken at the destination. Instagram, Booking, and TripAdvisor – all of them sell us “arriving.” But our job is to sell the things that do not fit into a photograph. The sway of a train. The laugh of a stranger speaking at the next table in a restaurant. The silence of standing alone in front of a painting in a museum, after the crowd has thinned.
All of this reminded me of a simple truth: the crisis of the travel industry is not a price crisis, not a capacity crisis, not a routing crisis. It is an attention crisis.
As long as we push our guests to see everything, do everything, tick everything, share everything – we are in fact letting them experience nothing. Our real job is not to promise more; it is to promise less, and to deliver something deeper inside that less.
The real gift of a journey is not where you arrive; it is who you have become by the time you arrive.
