Greetings, Travel Tip-Seekers!

It’s not too late for you and your friends (women 45+) to enter our travel photo contest and be eligible to win big prizes! We’re looking for travel photos that capture a sense of wonder. Doesn’t have to be on a NextTribe trip. Anywhere you’ve traveled!

Check out all the details here.

First prize: $1,000 cash or $2,000 off a future NextTribe Trip!

No ai images will be accepted. Our judges have ways of checking for that!

Deadline to submit is May 15.

Now, in other news…

Here are this week’s tips curated for you from our reliable sources in the travel industry and from general interest newsletters, websites, and publications.

My mom always said she either wanted to die on a stage taking her final bow, or meet her maker in a revolution in a foreign country!

I’m not looking for trouble, but if I had to worry about every news story (especially shootings) I’d never travel in the US, much less overseas—unless it’s Iceland, considered the safest country in the world.

This Friday I’m heading to Mexico City. I’ll visit the pyramids at Teotihuacan, where a Canadian tourist was recently shot and killed. If we all had to choose our travel based on troubling news stories none of us would ever go anywhere! Random acts of violence happen every day, all over the world.

But so do random acts of kindness. Generosity. Friendship. The more Jeannie Ralston and I travel the world leading our trips, the more it recharges our souls, and renews our faith in humanity. The world is full of beautiful, wonderful, kind humans and we can’t imagine letting fear of the unknown stop us from getting on a plane and going somewhere new.

We realize not everyone is like us, but we hope our continued travels with our small groups will encourage you to venture out. Whether you travel with us, with friends and family, or on your own, we hope you’ll keep exploring, keep meeting new people, and keep feeding your soul with travel.

Japan Airlines has the only safety video I’ve ever seen that demonstrates proper form when using the chute in an emergency landing. Good to know! And yes, I watch the safety videos, check for the nearest exit, and try to look like I’m paying attention to the flight attendants when they make their announcements. Except the credit card offers. Enough already!

My passport is set to expire at the end of November. I plan to renew by mail next month, as soon as I get back from Mexico. Maybe it will slip in under the radar before the new passport designs—featuring the President’s photo—are adopted. The Bulwark (and Fox News) both reported that the White House has confirmed they will do a test run of 25,000 passports with the presidential mug on it. If you love him and you can wait, maybe you’ll get the new design. I’d rather not have any politician on my beloved little blue book, thank you!

These packing cubes from Tripped look opaque but I bought them in white and they are translucent so you can see what’s inside. I love them! One of our other frequent travelers swears by the ones you can buy on Quince. Personally I prefer the soft kind that have no structure or wiring in them because they can slide around, fold, squish, and do whatever I need them to do. I use them more for organization than anything else. I expect things to get wrinkled and when they do, I run a hot shower and leave them hanging in the bathroom. That usually does the trick for me on all types of fabrics. Those wrinkle sprays never work!

Are you using ai to shop for airfares? It can be super helpful, but not if you just input dates and destinations. These tools really work best when you give them very specific instructions to do deep research, and then continue to ask questions after you see the results.

Over the next few issues of this newsletter I’ll post some helpful airfare shopping prompts for your favorite ai tool.

Here’s the first prompt you could try. After you put in your dates, destinations, and any airlines preferences (though that will severely limit your results), add this:

“Act as a professional flight analyst. Break my route into hidden city tickets, nearby departure and arrival airports, and multi-leg combinations airlines don’t surface. Compare direct vs. split routes, explain the price gap, and rank the cheapest legal options.”

Another hack (from our friends at AFAR media) is to use a combination of Google Flights and…wait for it…Wikipedia! Reading through it all makes my head hurt, but I know many of you love to nerd out on airfare bargains so..enjoy!

I was able to give away almost all of the toys I took with me to Japan. Some went to local children, some to visitors, and the last of them went to a crying child at LAX whose poor father was traveling solo with two other children, clearly unprepared for the chaos of traveling with toddlers!

After I wrote about traveling with toys, NextTriber Leslie Garcia wrote this: “You mentioned gifting little toys to kids while traveling-I do the same thing!!  Here is a fun item that seems to keep fussy kids quiet for a while-I give them away.  They are about the size of a pen, fit in my bag easily and have quieted many little ones during flights.”

Thanks for reading. Happy trails!

Jeannie Edmunds

Chief Operating Officer

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