Category: Travel

Travel Photographer Marisa Hampe Reflects On Her Favorite Photos

Loknath Das

Photographer Marisa Hampe posts beautiful travel images from around the world on her Instagram, but unlike other popular accounts, her photos are dark and daring rather than the sweet and sunny photos that often crowd our feeds. Also instead of checking off popular locales, the German content creator seeks our remote locations frequently scaling mountains and cliffs to get an unobstructed view from the top. I spoke to Hampe about some of her most memorable photos to date and how she got her start in the business. Marisa HampeMARISA HAMPE How did you get…

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Drop the travel sheets—and actually travel

Loknath Das

I love to travel. Seeing the world is about as close as I come to a vice, maybe an obsession—almost any time to any place by any available means of transportation. I used to tell people, “Offer me a bus ticket to Bakersfield and I’m your guy.” It’s probably a result of my upbringing. I won’t bore you with details or look for sympathy, but for much of my childhood we didn’t have a car and if I wanted to go somewhere, I walked. Add to that the fact that…

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New EU travel requirements mean (slightly) more paperwork for American visitors

Loknath Das

Starting in 2021, Americans will no longer be able to hop across the pond for a spur-of-the-moment visit to Europe without completing pre-authorization paperwork. But they still won’t need a visa. On Friday, multiple outlets reported that the European Union had announced that Americans would be required to complete a new visa to visit member countries — a shift away from the current policy which allows US citizens to travel through the 26 European members of the “Schengen Area” for up to 90 days without a visa. In actuality, the EU’s new…

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Delhi-Meerut Rapid Rail corridor gets UP Cabinet nod! Soon travel from Delhi to Meerut in just 60 minutes

Loknath Das

The UP cabinet has approved the Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut RRTS project, which is the inaugural corridor of the RRTS system Delhi-Meerut Regional Rapid Transit System: Soon the citizens of Delhi and NCR will forget their long-distance travel woes! In a major development to the regional rapid transit system (RRTS), the Uttar Pradesh (UP) cabinet has approved the Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut RRTS project, which is the inaugural corridor of the RRTS system, according to a recent PTI report. The project aims at providing a speedy and pollution-free transit system, connecting the regional nodes of the…

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Instagramming Couple’s ‘Daring’ Travel Photo Has Netizens Unimpressed

Loknath Das

What would you do for the perfect travel photo? Dangle out of a moving train? Well, that’s exactly what a couple did. But the reaction was probably not quite as expected. Raquel and Miguel are pair of travel Instagrammers who run the Instagram account ‘explorerssaurus_’. Their account is filled with photographs of the couple in picturesque locations and most of them are breath taking. However, in the quest to get the perfect picture, the couple may have gone a step too far this time. In a recent post from the…

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China bans 23m from buying travel tickets as part of ‘social credit’ system

Loknath Das

Beijing railway station. Local governments and agencies have been piloting aspects of the system. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA China has blocked millions of “discredited” travellers from buying plane or train tickets as part of the country’s controversial “social credit” system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens. According to the National Public Credit Information Centre, Chinese courts banned would-be travellers from buying flights 17.5 million times by the end of 2018. Citizens placed on black lists for social credit offences were prevented from buying train tickets 5.5 million times. The report released…

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Trailblazers in Travel: Get To Know These Impressive Travel Business Owners

Loknath Das

March 7 is International Women’s Day and in anticipation of it, I wanted to take a closer look at female-founded businesses in the travel industry. Not too long ago the industry was very male-dominated with women business owners and tour operators being relatively rare, however, that has changed a lot. I spoke to seven women who have found their own niche, founded their own business and are blazing their own trail in the travel industry. They tell me how they did it below. Rocio Vazquez LandetaPHOTO COURTESY OF ROCIO VAZQUEZ LANDETA…

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‘Hidden city’ travel: why airlines are cracking down on a discount trick

Loknath Das

A Lufthansa flight lands in Munich. The airline says a single case of ‘hidden city’ travel cost them more than €2,000. Photograph: Lukas Barth/EPA Airlines are cracking down on a ticketing loophole that can knock thousands of pounds off the cost of travel – but the fight back is only giving more publicity to the advantages of “hidden city” travel. At its most simplistic, hidden city ticketing is when a passenger purchases a ticket to less popular and thus cheaper destination that happens to be routed through a more popular, and thus…

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How to save money on travel (including bucket list destinations)

Loknath Das

Whether it’s written down in the back of your agenda, in a note on your phone or filed away in a mental cabinet to be called on by daydreams when work and life get too hectic, we all have a bucket list of places we’d love to go. Unfortunately for many of us, that’s exactly where these destinations stay — on a list that never gets checked off. Pricey flights and hotels make jet-setting to far off, exotic locales difficult. But if you know how to go about booking them, you…

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27 Best Business Travel Tips From A Boss Babe In The Tech Space

Loknath Das

Olinda Hassan is a partner on the Strategy & Innovation team at Twitter and an expert on business travel. Here, she is pictured in Singapore.PHOTO COURTESY OF OLINDA HASSAN Thanks to technology, the world is getting smaller and smaller, and yet, sometimes you need to be there in person, which is the case for Olinda Hassan, a partner on the Strategy & Innovation team at Twitter. Now based in San Francisco, this boss babe helps drive Twitter’s customer experience strategy and regularly travels around the world to meet with and learn from various groups. In order to maintain her hustle both on…

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