Italy, Call Me By Your Name style: staying at Luca Guadagnino’s hotel May 17, 2025 Every so often in films, carpets steal the spotlight. There’s the hypnotic hexagonal pattern in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, The Dude’s Persian rug in The Big Lebowski, or the Kubrick-inspired flooring in The Substance. And no premiere is complete without the deep plush of a freshly vacuumed red carpet. At Palazzo Talìa in Rome, designed [...]
Why going all-inclusive in the Maldives gets the best of paradise May 6, 2025 Ruth Jessop was surprised when she feel for all-inclusive life in the Maldives I’m sitting on a tiny seaplane with twelve other people. We’re packed in tightly: there’s barely enough room to stand up, and most of us are knocking elbows with the other passengers, and jetlagged. The journey to the Maldives has been long [...]
Jet2 shares soar on £250m buyback and higher summer bookings April 29, 2025 Shares in Jet2 soared more than 15 per cent on Tuesday as the leisure travel firm reported healthy profit growth and unveiled a £250m share buyback programme. Group profit before foreign exchange revaluation and taxation is expected to come in at between £565m and £570m, an increase of around nine per cent year-on-year. Jet2 said [...]
Maradiva: Mauritius in five-star style April 29, 2025 It is rare that I feel an urge to return to a hotel – part of the joy of travel is to experience a place for the first time, after all. But I’ll make an exception for Maradiva, the five star resort in Mauritius where your dreams of borderline-pornographic beachfront perfection are dragged, startled and [...]
White Lotus fans climbed over rocks with bleeding feet to break onto set, says hotel manager April 19, 2025 It’s a story as wild as a plot from the show: during the filming of The White Lotus season 3 in Thailand, two female fans walked across jagged rocks with bleeding feet to break onto the beach of the hotel where the filming was taking place. The filming for The White Lotus season 3 took [...]
Teeth, tourism and hairlines: Is Turkey the future of British healthcare? April 19, 2025 As millions of Brits fly to Turkey for medical treatments each year, Amber Murray visits Istanbul to find an industry getting a lucrative makeover Everyone at the exit of Istanbul airport is well aware most people aren’t just arriving for a holiday. The process from plane to taxi to clinic is well streamlined: men holding [...]
WH Smith: High street profit slumps ahead of Modella sale April 16, 2025 WHSmith’s high street division has reported a significant drop in trading profit, falling by over 30 per cent as it prepares for its sale to private equity firm Modella Capitlal. The retailer’s high street business delivered a profit of £15m for the six months to Febuary 28, 2025, down from £22m in the same period [...]
Aboard the real Orient Express train from Europe to the East April 9, 2025 It has always irked me that trains billed as the Orient Express, like the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express, only go as far as Istanbul. Why evoke the romance of the Orient only to end the journey at the edge of Europe? It’s a disappointment, but more gallingly for anyone passionate about long-distance train travel, it’s also a missed [...]
The City Break: holiday like a royal in the New Forest April 8, 2025 For this week’s City Break, Justine Gosling goes to the most-loved national park in the south Once a royal hunting ground for William the Conqueror, the New Forest National Park is the UK’s most visited, and among the smallest and most accessible of the UK’s national parks. Stretching over 380 km sq across Hampshire and [...]
Five key business travel trends in 2025 and beyond April 1, 2025 Just three years ago, the future of business travel hung in the balance. Office spaces were being relinquished, metaverse technologies promised a life of WFA (Work From Anywhere), and the threat of another Covid wave loitered on the horizon. But a new “Business Travel Trends 2025” report co-authored by the trend forecasting agency Globetrender and Amadeus [...]