Where Travel and Life Intersect

Are We All Ugly Americans Now?

Most people have the Ugly American wrong.

The term comes from The Ugly American, a 1958 novel by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick — a political thriller about American failures in Southeast Asia. The actual ugly American in the book wasn’t the boorish tourist demanding everyone speak English. He was the hero: a plain, grease-under-his-fingernails engineer who lived simply, learned the language, and actually listened to the people he was there to help.

He was called ugly because he looked the part, unglamorous, nothing like the diplomats in their pressed suits.

The title was ironic. The ugly American was the good guy.

The term quickly got away from its authors. Within a few years, it had flipped, becoming shorthand for the other kind of American abroad… loud, entitled, fluent only in English, and the assumption that everyone else should be too.

That’s the one who stuck.

For decades, the Ugly American was an individual problem. One man at a restaurant, one couple at a monument, yelling to be understood by someone who doesn’t speak the language. Announcing this isn’t how we do it at home. Treating a foreign country like a service built for their own convenience.

Embarrassing. But contained.

Something has changed. Whatever your politics, America’s standing in the world has changed. The ugliness isn’t just individual anymore. It’s how the country is being read.

This has created a new kind of traveler: the American abroad who did nothing wrong. Who is patient, curious, and trying to be a decent guest. But who walks around wearing the weight of a place they can’t quite explain.

I was in Morocco recently, outside Marrakech, in the Agafay Desert. Our guide introduced it that way on the drive out, the fake desert, he said, smiling, because it’s stone and scrub rather than sand, a fraction of the distance to the Sahara. Close enough for a day trip. Real enough for a camel.

The group was mostly American and French. The guide was patient, professional, and clearly good at his job.

Then a man near the front began insisting, loudly and repeatedly, that his camel be made to kneel lower so his wife could mount more easily. The guide explained the situation once, twice. The man grew more insistent.

He wasn’t being malicious. He thought he was being helpful, even gallant. He was simply somewhere unfamiliar and operating entirely by the rules of somewhere familiar, and the gap between those two things was invisible to him.

After a long moment, the guide looked at the rest of us. Just a look. It said: do something. It said: you’re together in this, aren’t you?

I felt that look in a way I wouldn’t have ten years ago.

A 2025 TravelAge West survey of travel advisors found that nearly three-quarters of their clients are now worried about how they’ll be perceived abroad, up from sixty percent just a few months earlier. People are changing plans. Some are staying home.

The questions that used to come occasionally — what is going on over there? — now come on nearly every trip. From café owners, tour guides, strangers at dinner who can’t quite help themselves.

They are not, for the most part, hostile. That’s worth holding onto.

Last month, at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan, something clarified all of this better than any survey. As the American athletes walked into the stadium, sixty-five thousand people cheered warmly, the way Olympic crowds do for a team they’re glad to see.

Then the camera cut to Vice President Vance in the stands. The same crowd booed. Loudly.

A sports columnist covering her twenty-second Olympics wrote that she couldn’t remember ever hearing anything like it at an opening ceremony.

The athletes and the politician entered the same stadium, representing the same country. The crowd had no trouble telling them apart.

The IOC said afterward that athletes shouldn’t be held responsible for whatever their governments have done. The crowd in Milan had already worked that out on their own.

That instinct, to separate a country from its people, a government from the travelers it produces, turns out to be more durable than the headlines suggest.

The questions from waiters, shopkeepers, and strangers in courtyards are not accusations. They’re invitations. An opening to be honest about something most of us are already carrying.

The most useful thing an American can do abroad right now is stay honest. Do not defend, do not perform, do not stitch a Canadian flag onto your backpack. Just acknowledge the reality and let the conversation go where it goes.

The guide gave the camel a gentle tap. The man’s wife climbed on. We moved into the dunes. The sun was going down, and the sand was the color of copper, and no one said anything for a long time.

Some things you can’t fix. You can still go. And right now, going might be the most American thing you can do.

— Paul M. Rand, Founder, Nomadic Spirit

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Destinations worth traveling for—and understanding once you arrive

Le Relais de l’Entrecôte · Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris

It was raining. Not a light Parisian drizzle, but a soaking rain. More than a hundred people stood on Rue Saint-Benoît getting wet. Almost none of them left.

Our daughter had been insistent in a way that got our attention. Le Relais de l’Entrecôte, Saint-Germain. Don’t be late to the line. There is one thing on the menu. Just go.

She knows Paris well. Left to ourselves, we’d have chosen somewhere quieter, more considered. A steakhouse with one thing on the menu wasn’t exactly our instinct. But she was certain, and her certainty was persuasive.

So we went. We got in line. Then the rain came.

Umbrellas went up. Raincoats got zipped. Someone laughed. And then Scott introduced himself.

He was from Greenville, South Carolina. Before long he had a dozen strangers treating each other like old friends. He’d been in Paris a year, enrolled in a graduate program, and had no intention of going home. He was gay, he told us, and had felt increasingly unsafe in the U.S. Paris had given him something Greenville couldn’t. He was visibly, unguardedly happy.

Standing next to him was his twin sister. She’d flown over to see his life — to check in, to understand. This was the one place he’d insisted they come.

Not Notre Dame. Not the Eiffel Tower. A restaurant with a line around the block in the rain.

We talked for the entire ninety minutes. Around us, five languages in ten steps — English, French, Japanese, Portuguese. Some were first-timers pulled here by someone’s insistence, just like us. Others were back for the third or fourth time, bringing someone new.

When we finally got inside, the simplicity of it was almost startling. A walnut salad. Then steak, sliced thin on a silver platter, in a sauce the family has kept secret since the restaurant opened in 1959. The frites are perfect. Before you’ve decided whether you want more, a server is already beside you with a fresh platter.

The whole thing runs about 29 euros. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Our daughter wasn’t at the table. But she’d chosen this for us, and we’d gone because we trusted her.

Across from us, Scott’s sister was watching her brother laugh with strangers in a city he’d made his own.

Outside, it was still raining.

Ideas, research, and stories shaping the future of intentional travel

A handful of stories and signals that caught our attention this week — on how travel is changing, and where it may be headed.

1. The Most Interesting Travelers Aren’t Going Where Everyone Else Is

Travelers are moving away from the headline cities, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, toward places with similar depth and far less saturation. Valencia over Barcelona. Lecce over Florence. Porto over Lisbon. It’s not about finding somewhere obscure. It’s about choosing somewhere that still feels like itself.

Axios

2. Travel as Skill, Not Consumption

For years, travel was measured by how much you saw — cities logged, days filled, itineraries optimized. Something is shifting. More travelers are paying attention to language, to context, to the texture of a place. Less like consumption, more like practice. The goal isn’t to cover ground. It’s to understand it.

CNBC

_{3. The Real Luxury Is Time}

_{Some travelers are staying longer and moving less — not to see more, but to see better. A week in one neighborhood instead of three cities in ten days. It’s not about slowing down for its own sake. It’s about giving a place enough time to show you what it actually is.}

_{Condé Nast Traveler}

_{4. The Case for Doing Less}

_{A new Vrbo report finds 91% of travelers want their next trip built around rest, reading, and time with people they like — not a schedule. The industry is calling it “soft travel.” The name is new; the instinct isn’t. One anchor per day, open hours around it, and no pressure to account for the rest. The best parts of a trip rarely fit into a plan.}

_Parade

_{5. Fewer People, Better Experiences}

_{Large-group travel hasn’t gone away, but it’s no longer the default for experienced travelers. Smaller groups — often six to twelve people — offer a different kind of access and pace. The appeal isn’t exclusivity. It’s quality. Fewer voices, better conversations, and a guide who can read the room instead of managing a crowd.}

_{Times of India}