the tourist company is thought money next year

The Tourist Season 1 Ending Explained

• Elliot's true identity as a crime boss's accountant is revealed in The Tourist season 1 finale.
• Elena Pascal is exposed as Elliot's trafficking victim, highlighting his brutal past crimes.
• The complex moral question of guilt for crimes committed without memory is left open in The Tourist.

Content warning: This article includes discussions of suicidal ideation and drug trafficking

Although The Tourist season 1’s ending didn’t answer all the show's lingering mysteries, the thriller’s conclusion did offer pretty clear conclusions to most of its main storylines. The Tourist opens with Jamie Dornan’s Elliot Stanley waking up after a car crash and suffering severe amnesia. Elliot spends The Tourist season 1 trying to uncover the mystery of his past with the help of Danielle McDonald’s Constable Helen. Eventually, in the series finale, it becomes clear that Elliot is not the ordinary civilian he thought he was. Instead, he's really Eugene Cassidy, an international crime boss’s accountant.

This crime boss, Kosta, tries to hunt down Elliot and retrieve the money that Dornan’s character stole from his former employer. Elliot realizes that he went on the run with Luci, Kosta’s fiancée, after stealing the money. Gradually, The Tourist ’s entire cast of characters comes together in the complex season 1 finale. Elliot is pursued by both Kosta and the corrupt cop Lachlan Rogers as he is reunited with his pre-amnesia love interest Luci. Meanwhile, he still can’t recall the identity of the mysterious Elena Pascal, a woman who is smiling at him in all of his foggy, unclear partial memories.

The Tourist season 1 is available on Netflix.

Who Elena Pascal Is In The Tourist Season 1 Ending

Elena pascal turned out to be elliot’s trafficking victim.

In The Tourist season 1’s ending, Elliot is finally reunited with Elena Pascal after a showdown with Luci, Lachlan, and Kosta. Elena is a former victim of Elliot’s drug trafficking ring , and it turns out that he used her body to smuggle heroin into Australia. Elliot’s gruesome plan involved stitching bags of the drug into her stomach to be removed by his colleagues upon her arrival. Unlike two other drug mules Elliot also coached, Elena survived her ordeal because Elliot told her to smile on her way through customs, thus avoiding suspicion. Elliot is horrified to learn of his awful crimes.

However, Elena doesn’t tell the police Elliot’s real identity as she decides that leaving him to live with his mistakes is a fitting punishment. The Tourist 's amnesia plot provides a brutal twist here, as viewers learn that the show’s charismatic leading man was an unrepentant monster before his car accident. Although the audience already knows that Elliot worked as Kosta’s accountant and went on the run after stealing the criminal’s money and his fiancée, these antics pale in comparison to what he put Elena Pascal through. Thus, while Elliot survived confronting Kosta, he didn't necessarily want to continue living.

Kostas and Luci Die In The Tourist Season 1’s Ending

Elliot’s former boss and love interest were both shot.

Before Elliot meets Elena again, Kosta's and Luci’s stories are also wrapped up in The Tourist season 1 finale. Both were shot during the climactic showdown between Elliot, who recently discovered he was the criminal's duplicitous accountant, and Kostas. Kostas died immediately, whereas Luci died while Elliot was driving her to a hospital for treatment . This tragic moment was another major blow for Elliot, as it meant his entire pre-amnesia plan was pointless. To make matters worse, the corrupt Lachlan fled the scene of Costa’s death, freed his wife from Kosta’s men, and framed Helen for Rodney Lammon’s murder.

Why Helen Leaves Ethan In The Tourist Season 1’s Ending

Helen decided her fiancé was too controlling.

Helen spent most of The Tourist season 1 in an unhappy relationship with the controlling Ethan, but Helen finally dumped her fiancé in the finale when he took his behavior too far. Ethan’s incessant attempts to control Helen, beginning with comments about her weight and culminating in him threatening to leave her if she helped Elliot, led Helen to dump her fiancé. Helen went looking for Elliot after dumping Ethan and her hunt for him couldn’t have started at a better time, since she soon learned that she and Elliot were both wanted for Rodney Lammon’s murder.

How Helen Proved Lachlan Was Guilty

Helen showed the police evidence that lachlan kidnapped elliot.

Helen and Elliot were forced to hold a restaurant hostage so that they could exonerate themselves, a risky ploy that eventually paid off. After a chase through The Tourist ’s Australian setting , Helen and Elliot held up a restaurant and Helen received a photo from a colleague of Lachlan with Elliot handcuffed in his passenger seat . This proved that Elliot and Helen couldn’t have killed Rodney Lammon, contradicting Lachlan’s version of events and leading the police to arrest Lachlan for the crime instead. During the negotiations, Elliot also demanded to see Elena Pascale, which set up his devastating reunion with his former victim.

Why Helen Sent Elliot A Burrito Emoji In The Tourist Season 1 Ending

Helen wanted elliot to know she forgave him.

When Elliot discovered the depraved reality of his crimes, he was disgusted by his conduct. However, Helen was even more appalled as she realized that the enigmatic man she spent weeks protecting and helping was guilty of this grotesque abuse. Elliot’s discovery of his crimes sent him into a self-destructive spiral that culminated in him driving off the road in an attempt to dull his pain and lose his memory again. Although he ended up in hospital, Elliot retained his memory and was confronted by Helen, who said that she wanted nothing to do with him after learning about his past.

After this, Elliot attempted to take his own life by mixing a bottle of pills and liquor, although he seemingly survived this attempt. As he lay on the floor, Elliot read a message from Helen that was simply a burrito emoji . This was a private joke between the duo that essentially meant “ We’re good ,” with Helen using this message to prove that she forgave Elliot for his crimes. After all, his memory loss meant he was effectively no longer the same person who committed them. Although Dornan’s character looked unwell, he seemed pleased by this in the finale’s closing moments.

What The Tourist Season 1’s Ending Really Means

The tourist calls its antihero’s past and identity into question.

The Tourist ’s season 1 finale forced viewers to contend with the tricky moral question of whether a person can be guilty of a crime they don’t know they committed . As Lachlan pointed out, the corrupt cop was arguably less guilty than Elliot back when Elliot was still a drug smuggler and a crime boss’s deceitful employee. However, the amnesia-stricken Elliot who built a relationship with Helen was a different person who didn’t even know the extent of his earlier crimes.

As such, The Tourist season 1 finale questioned whether Elliot was guilty since his memory loss reshaped his personality. As far as Helen was concerned, Elliot had atoned for his sins. However, Elena Pascal felt that he should live with a guilty conscience for the rest of his days. The Tourist season 1 finale didn't offer viewers an easy answer here, instead implying that both characters had a point in their divergent views of Dornan’s flawed character.

The Tourist

Release Date February 29, 2024

Cast Genevieve Lemon, Alex Dimitriades, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Danielle Macdonald, lafur Darri lafsson, Jamie Dornan, Damon Herriman

Genres Drama, Mystery, Action

Rating TV-MA

• Cast & crew
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The Tourist

When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him.

• Harry Williams
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• Jamie Dornan
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• 350 User reviews
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• 4 wins & 13 nominations total

Episodes 12

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• Lena Pascal

• Niamh Cassidy

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• Trivia The reason season 2 is set in Ireland was because Jamie Dorman didn't want to spend several month away in Australia again. The decision was made to relocate so Jamie could be close to his family
• Connections Featured in Jeremy Vine: Episode #5.5 (2022)

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8. The tourist company was _______ down the street than I had thought. * 1 điểm A. far B. farther C. further D. farer 9. Of the twins, Maria weighs_____and is_______. * 1 điểm A. more/the taller B. less/the higher C. the most/the tallest D. the least/the highest 10. What is the name of the girl _______ bicycle was stolen? * 1 điểm A. who B. whom C. of which D. whose 11. I don't have______to rent a new apartment. * 1 điểm A. money enough B. too much money C. enough money D. much money enough 12. The stairs_______to the cellar are quite slippery. * 1 điểm A. leads B. leading C. led D. that led 13. Yesterday was the day _______ they celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary * 1 điểm A. which B. in which C. when D. B&C are correct 14. Helen is the________ of the two sisters. * 1 điểm A. kindest B. kinder C. same kind D. least kind

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`8` The tourist company was _______ down the street than I had thought.

`to` B. farther/ C. further vì có than nên ta chọn far ⇒  farther/ further.

`9` Of the twins, Maria weighs_____and is_______.

`to` C. the most/the tallest vì tall thường dùng cho con người còn high dành cho vật mà Maria là con người ⇒ tall.

`10` What is the name of the girl _______ bicycle was stolen?

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`11` I don't have______to rent a new apartment.

`to` C. enough money  vì money là DT mà có cấu trúc: enough+ N+ to V.

`12` The stairs_______to the cellar are quite slippery.

`to` D. that led  vì cấu trúc: N(person, thing)+ that+ S+ V.

`13` Yesterday was the day _______ they celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary.

`to` C . when vì when chỉ một thời gian ở QK.

`14` Helen is the________ of the two sisters.

`to` A.  kindest vì đây là SSN nen ta dùng kindest.

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• Why <i>The Tourist</i> Should Be Your Next Netflix Binge–And What to Know Before Watching

Why The Tourist Should Be Your Next Netflix Binge–And What to Know Before Watching

T ake a break from endlessly scrolling through Netflix searching for something new to watch and just press play on The Tourist, the BBC series which stars Jamie Dornan as a mysterious Irishman who wakes up in an Australian hospital with amnesia.

The wry thriller isn’t necessarily new—it premiered on the BBC in 2022 and quickly became one of the U.K.’s most-watched dramas of that year—but it is a recent addition to Netflix, which acquired the exclusive rights to the series last year and started streaming it in February. (Season 1 of The Tourist was previously available to stream in the U.S. on Max.) 

At just six episodes, The Tourist is a low-risk, high-reward viewing experience full of twists and turns that are sure to keep you on your toes. Think Memento if directed by the Coen Brothers . Even better, if you like what you see, you can launch right into season 2, which is now streaming.

Here is what you need to know about your next great Netflix binge . 

What is The Tourist about?

The Tourist begins with an Irish guy (played by Dornan) making a pit stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, Australia. Nothing seems too out of the ordinary; he fills up his car, questions the gas station attendant’s bathroom key policy, visits the absolutely filthy restroom, and is on his way. But things get weird once he gets back on the road. He finds himself being harassed by a tractor trailer that seems hellbent on mowing him down. Just when it appears that he’s in the clear, he’s T-boned by the truck and left for dead on the side of the dirt road. 

When he wakes up, he’s in the hospital and has no memory of the accident or who he is. He doesn’t have a wallet or ID or phone on him to help jog his memory. This nameless man is now a tourist in his own life, struggling to understand who he was and why someone wanted him dead so badly. With help from a few kind, but not necessarily trustworthy strangers including Probationary Constable Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), local waitress Luci (Shalom Brune-Franklin), and Detective Inspector Lachlan Rogers (Damon Herriman), he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that leaves him with more questions than answers about his dark past. 

Why it’s worth your time

Let’s start with Jamie Dornan. He played the leading man in the Fifty Shades trilogy and the Academy Award-nominated 2021 drama Belfast , but The Tourist feels like the first time he’s been able to truly show his range as an actor. It’s hard to resist that Irish brogue, but it’s even harder to resist his “ get you a man that can do both ” charm. Fans of the superbly silly Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar already know how funny he can be—not to mention, what a great singer he is. But The Tourist lets him show off his dry, dark wit, while also letting him show off his romantic side. By the end of the series, you’ll be left wondering why he hasn’t yet been cast in a good rom-com. (Sorry, not sorry Wild Mountain Thyme .) In the show’s most gripping action sequences, he manages to channel another amnesiac with killer instincts, Jason Bourne. But thanks to his hangdog expression, Dornan is also able to pull off the existential dread his character feels after realizing he’s not the person he hoped he would be.

Obviously, it’s hard to take your eyes off Dornan, but the scenery in The Tourist isn’t too bad to look at either. The show, set in the Australian outback—like way, way out back—was filmed on location in South Australia around Adelaide, a city known for its coastline. (Adelaide's North Haven Beach serves as the show’s stand-in for Bali’s Kuta Beach.) It was also shot in the Flinders Ranges , the largest mountain ranges in South Australia, and in Peterborough, a small town in an area near Adelaide known as wheat country, which stood in for the sandy outback scenes. (Season 2 takes place in Ireland, so prepare yourself for greenery as far as the eye can see.) Despite all the drama onscreen, The Tourist makes Australia look like a nice place to visit.

What to remember before watching The Tourist season 2

Whether you’ve already finished the first season and need a bit of a refresher or you’re planning to skip straight to Season 2, this is what you need to know before watching the second season. 

Warning: major spoilers for The Tourist Season 1 ahead.

The Irish guy with amnesia is actually Elliot Stanley, and he’s done some really bad things in his life. 

While in the hospital, Elliot finds a note in his pants pocket with an address for a diner in a tiny town called Burnt Ridge. It’s there he meets Luci (Brune-Franklin), a waitress who is actually his ex-girlfriend. She only chooses to tell him his name and their relationship to one another after they discover a man’s dead body stashed in an oil drum that had been buried. The man was Marko (Damien Strouthos), who, like Elliot, worked for Kostas (Alex Dimitriades), an international drug lord and Luci’s fiancé.

Luci isn’t exactly who she claims to be. She’s a scammer who stole a rather sentimental bag of money from Kostas in order to run off with Elliot. Now the Greek gangster is back to collect. But Kostas isn’t all that interested in the cash; a million dollars is chump change to a guy like him. This is about ego. Kostas, a maniac who spikes his water with LSD to be able to speak with his dead brother, wants to punish Elliot for successfully stealing his girl.

Kostas decides to kidnap the wife of Detective Inspector Lachlan Rogers (Herriman) in hopes that it will scare the decorated officer into doing his bidding. It does; Lachlan apprehends Elliot and kills a young sergeant in the process, becoming one of the bad guys. But is Elliot also a bad guy? Probationary Constable Helen Chambers (Macdonald), the ambitious cop-in-training assigned to his case, doesn’t think so. She believes the fact that he was willing to save her from being shot by Kostas’ henchman means there is good in there somewhere, even if he has done bad things. But Elliot isn’t convinced that someone can really change. 

After drinking from Kostas’ LSD-laced water bottle, he has visions that offer some insight into who he may have been. He sees his first meeting with Kostas, where he’s hired as his accountant. He is able to relive his meet-cute with Luci and sees how toxic their relationship was. He discovers where he buried the bag of money and dreams of laying in bed with Helen. He also speaks to a Russian woman named Lena Pascal, who he’s seen before in his dreams. She tells him she’s in Adelaide and claims that she can help him “fill in the colors” of his past. 

Elliot worries that what he has seen aren’t memories, but hallucinations. When he finds the bag of money in the same spot he had envisioned it though, he believes that Lena may be real, too. Unfortunately, he can’t go looking for her just yet. After Kostas and Luci are killed in a shootout over the million dollars, Lachlan lies to the police in hopes of saving himself. He claims that Elliot and Helen kidnapped him and went on a shooting rampage à la Bonnie and Clyde, killing the young sergeant. Luckily, Helen is able to access the CCTV footage that shows Lachlan transporting Elliot in handcuffs, catching him in his lie. It saves both her and Elliott from going to jail and allows Elliot a chance to speak with Lena, who was not a figment of his imagination—though after their chat he wishes she was.

When Lena comes to meet him at the jail, she reveals that he wasn’t just Kostas’ accountant as he had dreamt, but helped train the drug mules, mostly young immigrant women who swallowed bags of heroin to transport across the globe. Lena tells a story of two girls who died instantly after the bags Elliot gave them exploded in their stomachs. Lena lived, but not without literal scars. She shows him the long gash across her stomach where she was cut open to retrieve the drugs. She claims Elliot was the one who ordered her to be butchered, worried the heroin would go to waste. He apologizes for his cruelty, but she doesn’t absolve him of his guilt. “You have to live with yourself,” she tells him as she leaves.

Elliot doesn’t think he can and attempts to have himself arrested, but Lena won’t press charges. He then attempts to lose his memory again by getting into another car crash. He flips his car over, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work. He can’t forget what Lena told him and neither can Helen, who after learning the evil that Elliot was capable of decides she can no longer see him. But she can’t stop thinking about him and wondering whether he or anyone should be defined by their worst mistakes. 

Elliot wonders the same, but the guilt is just too much. He decides that he can no longer live with himself and attempts to take his life with vodka and pills. Laid out on his bed, waiting to die, he gets a text: a burrito emoji from Helen.

The burrito references a scene earlier in the show, when Elliot and Helen were eating together in a Mexican restaurant. Helen is his hostage, but the night plays out like a first date. Elliot can’t remember what kind of food he likes so she suggests they order everything on the menu so he can figure out his taste now. She encourages him to stop thinking about who he was and start becoming the person he is meant to be. He later tells her that he equates burritos with happiness and her text becomes a lifeline. He might not be able to forget what he’s done, but she believes he has the capacity to change. The joy on his face when he sees her message makes it seem as if Elliot finally believes he can change too. But fans will have to wait until Season 2 to see if he’s able to become a better person.

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How TripAdvisor changed travel

The world’s biggest travel site has turned the industry upside down – but now it is struggling to deal with the same kinds of problems that are vexing other tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter

S hould one be so unlucky as to find oneself, as I did, lying awake in bed in the early hours of the morning in a hostel in La Paz, Bolivia, listening anxiously to the sound of someone trying to force their way into one’s room, one could do worse than to throw a chair under the doorknob as a first line of defence. But this is not what I did. Instead, I held my breath and waited until the intruder, ever so mercifully, abandoned his project and sauntered down the hall. The next morning, when I raised the incident with the hostel employee at the front desk, he said the attempted intrusion had just been an innocent mistake, a misdirected early-morning wake-up call gone wrong, and what was the big deal, anyway? Fuming, I turned to the highest authority in the world of international travel, the only entity to which every hotel, restaurant, museum and attraction in the world is beholden: I left the hostel a bad review on TripAdvisor.

TripAdvisor is where we go to praise, criticise and purchase our way through the inhabited world. It is, at its core, a guestbook, a place where people record the highs and lows of their holiday experiences for the benefit of hotel proprietors and future guests. But this guestbook lives on the internet, where its contributors continue swapping advice, memories and complaints about their journeys long after their vacations have come to an end.

Every month, 456 million people – about one in every 16 people on earth – visit some tentacle of TripAdvisor.com to plan or assess a trip. For virtually every place, there exists a corresponding page. The Rajneeshee Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune, India, has 140 reviews and a 4 out of 5 rating, Cobham Service Station on the M25 has 451 reviews and a rating of 3.5, while Wes Anderson’s fictional Grand Budapest Hotel currently has 358 reviews and a rating of 4.5. (At the top of the page, there is a message from TripAdvisor: “This is a fictional place, as seen in the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel. Please do not try to book a visit here.”)

Over its two decades in business, TripAdvisor has turned an initial investment of $3m into a $7bn business by figuring out how to provide a service that no other tech company has quite mastered: constantly updated information about every imaginable element of travel, courtesy of an ever-growing army of contributors who provide their services for free. Browsing through TripAdvisor’s 660m reviews is a study in extremes. As a kind of mirror of the world and all its wonders, the site can transport you to the most spectacular landmarks, the finest restaurants, the most “adrenaline-pumping” water parks, the greatest “Hop-On Hop-Off Experiences” that mankind has ever devised. Yet TripAdvisor reviews are also a ruthless audit of the earth’s many flaws. For every effusive review of the Eiffel Tower (“Worth the hype at night,” “Perfect Backdrop!”), there is another that suggests it is a blight on the face of the earth (“sad, ugly, don’t bother”; “ similar to the lobby of a big Vegas casino, but outside ”.)

TripAdvisor is to travel as Google is to search, as Amazon is to books, as Uber is to cabs – so dominant that it is almost a monopoly. Bad reviews can be devastating for business, so proprietors tend to think of them in rather violent terms. “It is the marketing/PR equivalent of a drive-by shooting,” Edward Terry, the owner of a Lebanese restaurant in Weybridge, UK, wrote in 2015. Marketers call a cascade of online one-star ratings a “review bomb”. Likewise, positive reviews can transform an establishment’s fortunes. Researchers studying Yelp, one of TripAdvisor’s main competitors, found that a one-star increase meant a 5-9% increase in revenue. Before TripAdvisor, the customer was only nominally king. After, he became a veritable tyrant, with the power to make or break lives. In response, the hospitality industry has lawyered up, and it is not uncommon for businesses to threaten to sue customers who post negative reviews.

As the so-called “reputation economy” has grown, so too has a shadow industry of fake reviews, which can be bought, sold and traded online. For TripAdvisor, this trend amounts to an existential threat. Its business depends on having real consumers post real reviews. Without that, says Dina Mayzlin, a professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, “the whole thing falls apart”. And there have been moments, over the past several years, when it looked like things were falling apart. One of the most dangerous things about the rise of fake reviews is that they have also endangered genuine ones – as companies like TripAdvisor raced to eliminate fraudulent posts from their sites, they ended up taking down some truthful ones, too. And given that user reviews can go beyond complaints about bad service and peeling wallpaper, to much more serious claims about fraud, theft and sexual assault, their removal becomes a grave problem.

Thus, in promising a faithful portrait of the world, TripAdvisor has, like other tech giants, found itself in the unhappy position of becoming an arbiter of truth, of having to determine which reviews are real and which are fake, which are accurate and which are not, and how free speech on their platform should be. It is hard to imagine that when CEO Stephen Kaufer and his co-founders were sitting in a pizza restaurant in a suburb of Boston 18 years ago dreaming up tripadvisor.com, they foresaw their business growing so powerful and so large that they would find themselves tangled up in the kinds of problems that vex the minds of the world’s most brilliant philosophers and legal theorists. From the vantage point of 2018, one of the company’s early mottos now seems comically naive: “Get the truth and go.”

Many of the difficult questions the company faces are also questions about the nature of travel itself, about what it means to enter unknown territory, to interact with strangers, and to put one’s trust in them. These are all things that one also does online – it is no coincidence that the some of the earliest analogies that we once used to talk about the digital world (“information superhighway”, “electronic frontier”) tended to belong to the vocabulary of travel. In this sense, the story of TripAdvisor, one of the least-examined and most relied-upon tech companies in the world, is something like a parable of the internet writ large.

T he travel guide is an ancient genre, one that has never been far removed from the questions that trouble TripAdvisor LLC. For nearly all of human history, people have wanted to know everything about where they were going before they got there. The Greek geographer Pausanias is often credited with authoring the first travel guide, his Description of Greece, sometime in the second century AD. Over 10 books, he documented the sights and stories of his native land. Of Lake Stymphalia, in Corinth, for example, Pausanias writes: “In the Stymphalian territory is a spring, from which the emperor Hadrian brought water to Corinth … at one time man-eating birds bred on it, which Heracles is said to have shot down.” Today, on TripAdvisor, Lake Stymphalia gets a meagre rating of 3.5, below the average of 4: “It is more like a swampy marshland … there isn’t really anywhere to chill out and relax so we didn’t stay long,” writes one reviewer . Beneath this review, and beneath all TripAdvisor reviews, is a disclaimer: “This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC.”

When TripAdvisor was founded, in 2000 – six years after Amazon, four years before Facebook and Yelp – consumer reviews were still thought of as a risky endeavour for businesses, a losing bet. Amazon first allowed customers to post reviews in 1995, but it was a controversial move that some critics derided as retail suicide. When TripAdvisor launched, it did so as a simple aggregator of guidebook reviews and other established sources, keeping its distance from the unpredictable world of crowd-sourced content.

Kaufer envisaged TripAdvisor as an impartial referee, providing “reviews you can trust”, as one of its former taglines promised. But as an experiment, in February 2001, he and his partners created a way for consumers to post their own reviews. The first-ever review was of the Captain’s House Inn, on Cape Cod, which received four “bubbles”. (TripAdvisor uses “bubbles” rather than stars to evaluate companies to avoid confusing its ratings with more conventional luxury hotel ratings.)

Soon, Kaufer noticed that users were gravitating away from expert opinion and towards the crowdsourced reviews, so he abandoned his original concept and began focusing exclusively on collecting original consumer input. He hoped that selling ads on the site would be enough to keep the company afloat, but when it became clear that this wasn’t bringing in enough money, his team shifted to a new model. From late 2001, every time a visitor clicked on a link to a given hotel or restaurant, TripAdvisor would charge the business a small fee for the referral. Within three months, the company was making $70,000 a month, and in March 2002, it broke even. “I think they call it a pivot now,” Kaufer said in 2014. “I called it running for my life back then.”

By 2004, TripAdvisor had 5 million unique monthly visitors. That year, Kaufer sold TripAdvisor to InterActiveCorp (IAC), the parent company of the online travel company Expedia, for $210m in cash, but stayed on as CEO. It seemed like a good deal at the time – as Kaufer told Harvard Business School’s student newspaper in 2013, none of the founders were previously wealthy, so the windfall was a “life-changing event”. But he eventually regretted selling out so early on: “In hindsight, this was the stupidest move I ever made!”

For the next few years, TripAdvisor continued to grow, hiring more than 400 new employees around the world, from New Jersey to New Delhi. By 2008, it had 26 million monthly unique visitors and a yearly profit of $129m; by 2010, it was the largest travel site in the world. To cement its dominance, TripAdvisor began buying up smaller companies that focused on particular elements of travel. Today, it owns 28 separate companies that together encompass every imaginable element of the travel experience – not just where to stay and what to do, but also what to bring, how to get there, when to go, and whom you might meet along the way. Faced with such competition, traditional guidebook companies have struggled to keep up. In 2016, Fodor’s, one of the most established American travel guide companies, was bought by a company called Internet Brands.

Over time, hoteliers largely accepted that TripAdvisor wasn’t going away, even as they watched it turn their industry upside down. “The online world has changed pretty much every industry, but hospitality beyond recognition,” Peter Ducker, chief executive of the Institute of Hospitality, told me. “For a long time when [TripAdvisor] first came out, hoteliers didn’t like it. We didn’t want to air our dirty laundry in public,” he said. Now, though, “hotels have learned that a) it’s not going away, so get over it, and b) you can use it to your advantage … They use good TripAdvisor ratings in their marketing materials, because to a lot of the public, that means more than a star rating, more than a government accreditation. It transcends borders.”

B y 2011, TripAdvisor was drawing 50 million monthly visitors, and its parent company, IAC, decided that the time had come to spin it out as a separate, publicly traded entity. Its IPO was valued at $4bn, but in December, on the first day of trading, shares fell. TripAdvisor was in new and uncertain territory, and no one knew how the company would fare on its own.

TripAdvisor had become a tech giant, but its leadership did not quite realise that yet. The year it went public was the final year that TripAdvisor published its annual lists of the “Top 10 Dirtiest Hotels” in the US and Europe. A couple of months before the IPO, Kenneth Seaton, owner of what had been voted “America’s dirtiest hotel” (the Grand Resort Hotel & Convention Center, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee), filed a lawsuit against TripAdvisor for defamation, claiming $10m in damages. The suit was tossed out in 2012, after the judge ruled that any review posted to TripAdvisor is an opinion and therefore protected under the first amendment. Seaton appealed, but the original verdict was upheld on the grounds that the use of the word “dirtiest” could not count as defamation as it was no more than “rhetorical hyperbole”. TripAdvisor won the legal battle, but it still decided to scrub the “dirtiest” list from its site. “We want to stay more on the positive side,” Kaufer told the New York Times.

In 2012, the media behemoth Liberty Interactive purchased $300m in TripAdvisor shares. TripAdvisor had become an established giant of the travel industry, an inevitable part of even the most cursory vacation planning. As the company sought to clean up its public profile, its audience grew, but so did the pressure to turn a profit. “When [platforms] start to commercialise, it changes the DNA,” says Rachel Botsman, a lecturer at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School who has chronicled the rise of the reputation economy. “When that happens, it’s a problem.” Many of the website’s most loyal users feel most aggrieved by the way the site has changed.

On the forums, which are still organised into pixelated manilla folders reminiscent of early-90s computer graphics, users seek out companionship and camaraderie. On the Disneyland Paris forum , one of the most active communities on the site, people swap stories of when they first fell in love with the park, which they affectionately call DLP. In one typically tender post from a few years ago, a user celebrated DLP’s refurbishments: “It was so sad to see how shabby some things had become over the last few years, (Captain Hook’s proud red galleon now looked like a pathetic pink derelict hulk) but I always tried to see past that, and still feel the Magic there. How fantastic that everyone can now see the park as it once was!”

The most prolific TripAdvisor contributors – people who have written at least 500 posts over six months – can become “Destination Experts”, responsible for patrolling forums and making sure no questions go unanswered. Bill Hunt, a retired photographer, began posting to TripAdvisor in 2005 and is now one of the site’s most active reviewers : he has posted 51,345 forum comments and 30,023 photos from his travels. “People will ask what the view is from row three on the starboard side of the plane. Well, I try to help,” Hunt told me over the phone from his patio in Phoenix, Arizona.

Hunt has been using the site almost as long as it has existed, and he isn’t too impressed with how it has evolved. “Let’s just say that I’m not the biggest fan of many of those changes,” he told me. “From the moment they went public, their focus became the generation of revenue.” Brad Reynolds , an American living in Hong Kong who has uploaded over 6,406 reviews, 28,514 forum posts, and 72,061 photos, also feels disappointed by the direction that TripAdvisor has taken. “It’s not quite as … community-friendly now as it used to be. In the early days, the active users were very much enthusiasts,” he told me. “It’s become a bit more impersonal in recent years.”

In 2015, when TripAdvisor introduced a programme called “TripCollective Member Recognition”, awarding Boy Scout-style symbols to users for the number, diversity and popularity of their posts, the forums revolted, complaining the new system was patronising. Disgruntlement with the symbols bled into an anxious discussion about the proliferation of fake reviews, and whether the site was losing its soul: “TA can remain effective only if reviews are written for altruistic purposes, to assist others with your information, hoping that when you need information, it will be given for that purpose,” wrote a user named captainmcd.

The forums don’t do much for TripAdvisor’s bottom line and, scrolling through them, one might get the impression that the company has forgotten they exist – their design looks like it hasn’t changed since 2000, and unless you know they’re there, you’re unlikely to go looking for them. But this, staff at TripAdvisor assured me, is not quite the case. “Our forums are like a secret weapon,” says Jeff Chow, the vice-president of product and consumer experience, who speaks in a buoyantly earnest patois that mingles idealism, elation and corporate jargon in a way that is occasionally hard to follow. “They are actually crafting our North Star.”

I met Chow earlier this year at TripAdvisor’s headquarters in Needham, Massachusetts, which are nestled into the side of the Route 128 highway, next to a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Every floor is named after a different continent, every conference room after a different country. The company logo is an owl with binocular eyes – one red and one green, because the site is supposed to tell you where to go and where not to go. At the groundbreaking ceremony for the new headquarters, an owl mascot joined Kaufer and the governor of Massachusetts in celebration. The gleaming reception is designed to resemble a hotel lobby. On an interior wall, there is a word cloud: “We love TRAVEL; Act like an OWNER; We’re better TOGETHER.” Employees are free to bring their dogs to work and to eat their complimentary gourmet lunch in the outdoor amphitheatre.

The office would not be out of place in Silicon Valley – “We’re very Google-y,” Brian Hoyt, senior director of corporate communications, told me – but it must be admitted that the side of the highway in Needham is not Silicon Valley. In the early 1990s, Route 128 was known as “America’s technology highway”, the east coast’s answer to California startup culture. But by the end of the decade, the 57-mile corridor had lost its lustre as its tenants were sold, shuttered or moved. Today, TripAdvisor’s neighbours are companies such as Raytheon, Oracle and Microsoft – stolid, established, imposing firms, the kinds of places where wearing hoodies and jeans at work is just another passing fad.

TripAdvisor fits nicely into this milieu. In his public appearances, Kaufer has the vibe of a middle-aged dad who is slightly peeved at being the focus of attention. He wears thin frameless glasses, branded black fleeces, khakis and smart shoes. He is earnest and, refreshingly for a tech executive, shows no apparent interest in making himself seem more exciting than he really is: “Most people assume I am an avid traveller who would like nothing more than to roam the world for three months,” he told the New York Times. “Not true. The company was born of an average traveller’s desire to plan a great trip for a precious week or two of vacation time.”

TripAdvisor was built in Kaufer’s image. The company caters to the middle as a point of pride. Dermot Halpin, who runs the experiences and vacation rentals divisions, said earlier this year that while on Airbnb “there’s a little bit of looking down their nose” at more generic vacation activities, such as taking a bus tour or visiting the Eiffel Tower, TripAdvisor is “very much in the mode of celebrating all those things”. When I visited company HQ, Bradford Young, vice-president and associate general counsel, put it another way: “One of the reasons that people generally think so fondly of TripAdvisor is that we’re in the vacations business. Vacations are awesome, right?”

E xcept, sometimes, they’re not – you might get sick, you might get lost, your luggage might get delayed, your flights cancelled, and just occasionally the place you booked might turn out to be nothing like it seemed online. Often, the reasons for this might be perfectly innocuous. Other times, they might not be. By the time TripAdvisor floated, the fake review market had started to explode. “Throughout history, nothing has changed – reputation has always been faked, bought, amplified, inflated,” says Botsman. “On TripAdvisor, this is happening on a scale that we’ve never really seen before.”

All of a sudden, reviews could be purchased and exchanged on a massive scale, new businesses could hire “reputation management” companies to help suppress bad reviews and promote good ones, and established businesses could pay for negative reviews of their competitors. Review farms, the reputation economy’s answer to call centres, proliferated in China and south-east Asia. “You have a thousand guys in a room. They can write in reasonably good English, and they get an assignment with the details of a product, then they just start posting reviews,” Noah Herschman, a retail industry architect at Microsoft in Hong Kong, told me. Researchers at Cornell found that real reviews tend to use more “concrete” terms such as “bathroom”, “price”, and “check-in”, while fake reviews tend to use more scenic ones, such as “vacation”, “husband” and “business trip”.

Though companies such as TripAdvisor and Amazon already had fraud-detection measures in place, fake review companies quickly learned to work around them. “The black market understands where the market is going way before the average user, before the average brand,” says Botsman. In autumn 2011, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority opened an investigation into TripAdvisor, and eventually ordered it “not to claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted”. TripAdvisor changed its motto from “Reviews You Can Trust” to “Know better. Book better. Go better.”

These days, at any given time, several hundred TripAdvisor employees are working on content moderation, about a third of those in fraud detection. “Generally, people who post fake reviews do it with a motivation in mind, to move the ranking up or down,” said James Kay, TripAdvisor’s senior media relations manager. “In the last three years we’ve shut down 60 companies selling reviews, and there are many more that we’re well aware of.”

TripAdvisor’s in-house forensic analysts use fraud-detection software – the same kinds used to detect credit card fraud – to flag suspicious patterns. But given the sheer amount of reviews on TripAdvisor and the increasing sophistication of the fakes, there is no hope of identifying and removing them all. Last year, Vice writer Oobah Butler managed to get his shed listed as the #1 restaurant in London by soliciting fake reviews from family and friends and posting images of gourmet-looking dishes made from shaving cream and bleach. Before joining Vice, Butler wrote fake TripAdvisor reviews for restaurants, £10 per entry; “this convinced me that TripAdvisor was a false reality,” he wrote of the experience. For Young, the tendency of businesses to rush to litigation in order to protect their reputations is symptomatic of “an iceberg problem”. As he explained: “TripAdvisor can see the 10% that is sticking out of the water. [But] there is 90% or some unknown percent that is very dangerous and problematic that it is not visible to us.”

TripAdvisor also employs a small team of investigators who work in the field, sometimes posing as hoteliers online to expose a review farm. First, they find posts on sites such as Facebook and eBay advertising review services. Then they pose as a business owner looking for fake reviews and settle on a price, and through this process, they collect enough evidence to shut down entire networks of fake review peddlers. In the run-up to the 2018 World Cup, for instance, thousands of fake reviews of hotels and restaurants in Russian cities hosting matches began popping up on TripAdvisor. According to Kay, TripAdvisor investigators found 1,300 suspicious accounts, removed 1,500 reviews from the site, and put 250 restaurants on a “special watch list” of establishments that might attempt to buy fake reviews. They also shut down 18 paid review companies, including one named tripadvisorboost.com.

Recalling the days before online discourse became tainted with the suspicion of fraud and fakery, Thales Teixeira, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, grew wistful. “When reviews came out it was the best thing, just independent people like you and me [contributing],” he said. But now things are somewhat murkier. “Consumers need to be careful when they’re reading reviews,” he said. “We’re not in Kansas any more.”

I n Kansas, earlier this year, a cattle farmer named Randy Winchester decided to take his daughter to a fun park in Branson, Missouri, where visitors can see the largest herd of Scottish Highland cattle in the midwest. As it turned out, Winchester was a bit underwhelmed, so he returned home and gave the park a mediocre rating on TripAdvisor. “All in all a decent experience but had we paid more than the $10 I would have been disappointed,” he wrote.

Soon, a man identifying himself as the owner of the fun park began bombarding both Winchester and his daughter with calls and messages, threatening to sue them. Winchester, appalled by the owner’s conduct, downgraded his review from three to one. In April, he found himself facing a $25,000 lawsuit from the owner of the park, who claimed the review constitutes libel.

Incidents such as this are part of a worrying trend. Genuine reviews, which can be difficult to authenticate and expensive to defend, often pose more serious difficulties than fake reviews, which the company is reasonably skilled at discovering and deleting. The truth is a far bigger problem for TripAdvisor, which has lately become entangled in debates over free speech that it has struggled to resolve.

Faced with bad reviews, some American businesses turn to what are known as “Slapp” suits (strategic lawsuits against public participation). In many cases, when a business files a Slapp suit, its objective is not to win in court – US free speech laws protect negative reviews – but to bully the reviewer into deleting the offending comment. While many states have passed anti-Slapp legislation to protect consumers from censorship and mounting legal fees, most are not strong enough to discourage businesses from pursuing them.

From 2015 to 2017, TripAdvisor users removed more than 2,000 reviews from the site as a result of harassment by business owners, according to Kevin Carter, TripAdvisor’s associate director of corporate communications. Businesses have also developed more subtle tactics designed to stop critical reviews from appearing in the first place. In July, Australia’s largest property developer was fined $3million for suppressing negative reviews of its rental apartments by withholding the email addresses of disgruntled guests from TripAdvisor, ensuring that the company could not prompt them to write a review. In an infamous case a few years ago, a boutique guesthouse in Hudson, New York added a provision, in the fine print of its contract with guests, stating that a single negative review posted online would result in a fine of $500. In this case, the hotel’s strategy backfired. After the policy was mocked in the pages of the New York Post, the hotel received more than 3,000 negative reviews on its Yelp and Facebook pages. Soon afterwards, it shut down.

Yet although TripAdvisor has fought to keep legitimate reviewers from being hounded into removing their posts by litigious owners, it has also struggled to come up with a coherent idea of which posts it is willing to defend. The company has a long list of rules on what speech is and isn’t allowed: all posts must be unbiased, first-hand, recent, non-commercial and free of profanity and hate speech, for instance. But while these categories seem relatively clearcut on paper, they can be ambiguous in practice.

The question of what language is permitted on TripAdvisor is not purely theoretical. The same question is currently bedevilling other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which have struggled to face up to the tangible effects their virtual worlds can have upon the physical one. Millions of travellers rely on TripAdvisor to inform them about their destinations – which bars or hotels they should try, and which ones to avoid – and the company’s content policy dictates what travellers can find out about their destinations before they set off. And in some cases, insufficient information can have tragic consequences.

In December 2010, an American woman named Kristie Love wrote on TripAdvisor about her recent stay at a Mexican resort hotel near Cancún. One night, Love found that her key card wasn’t working and asked a security guard for help. “Within minutes he grabbed me and forced me into the jungle/bushes and raped me,” she wrote. Almost as soon as her post went up, it disappeared from the site, and Love received a notification from TripAdvisor saying that her post breached the site’s “family-friendly” policy.

The next year, another woman reported being assaulted by a security guard at the same hotel. Love fought to have her original post reinstated, but TripAdvisor wouldn’t budge. Though the company’s family-friendly policy has since been revised, it is not consistently enforced, and its provisions are rather vague. On 1 November 2017, an investigation by Raquel Rutledge , a journalist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, found that TripAdvisor had a habit of deleting posts detailing sexual assaults and other violent crimes on the grounds that they either violated the family-friendly policy, contained second-hand information, or hearsay, or they were deemed “off topic” by site moderators. “There’s no way to know how many negative reviews are withheld by TripAdvisor; how many true, terrifying experiences never get told; or for site users to know that much of what they see has been specifically selected and crafted to encourage them to spend,” Rutledge wrote.

On 7 November, TripAdvisor’s market value crashed by $1bn when its stock price dropped from $39 to $30 per share, its worst-ever day on the stock market. A couple of weeks later, the US Federal Trade Commission opened an ongoing investigation into the company’s business practices. “For a long time, [companies] could claim that their role was largely proactive, that all they had to do was put safeguards in place to reduce the risks of bad things happening,” says Botsman. “We’ve seen a massive pendulum swing – it’s now their responsibility when things go wrong. This is a whole new era of corporate accountability.”

The day Rutledge’s story broke, TripAdvisor issued a public apology to Love, and hastily announced the introduction of a “badge” system that would label establishments where similar incidents had taken place with a red caution sign and a message from the company suggesting that users “perform additional research” before making a booking. But because TripAdvisor prides itself on providing the most up-to-date information, the badges will expire 90 days after the incidents are brought to the company’s attention.

Kristie Love’s post was restored to the forum where she originally posted it, buried behind thousands of other posts. Since the badge system was implemented last year, TripAdvisor says that “nearly a dozen” properties have been flagged for users, a figure that is staggeringly low given the millions of hotel listings that it proudly boasts. The company is reluctant to badge properties because, as Young put it, “TripAdvisor is not a factchecking business.” He added: “While we will moderate as aggressively as needed for our guidelines, we weren’t at the restaurant and we weren’t at the hotel. And accordingly, it’s not our place to weigh in on the facts of the review.”

The hotel where Love was raped was badged for 90 days on TripAdvisor.com, and for just three days on its mobile app. (TripAdvisor says the warning was up on mobile for the entire 90 days and that any disparities were due to product updates.) Then the warning disappeared.

D espite its recent difficulties, the number of reviews on TripAdvisor keeps growing. At present, more than 200 new posts are uploaded to TripAdvisor every minute. “We hear from time to time, like, ‘Don’t you have enough?’” Young told me. “There’s never enough. You want one from yesterday, not from last week, not from last month, not from last year.”

Since its crisis at the end of 2017, TripAdvisor’s stock has recovered, nearly doubling in value from the low point in November. Today, businesses can partner with TripAdvisor through simple cost-per-click advertising, sponsored placements, instant booking (TripAdvisor receives a 12-15% commission for direct bookings), and marketing services. In arecent earnings call with investors, Liberty CEO Greg Maffei was ebullient about its performance. “Trip had a fantastic quarter, full stop,” he said, referring to the company as one might refer to a favourite son.

Even so, TripAdvisor is still worth only half of what it was in June 2014, and its shares dropped again in August after it missed its revenue forecast. Booking.com and Expedia, which together accounted for 46% of TripAdvisor’s annual revenue last year, largely due to marketing deals, cut back on their advertising spending. Where Maffei saw positive results, the travel industry news site Skift saw warning signs. TripAdvisor had grown by only 2% in the second quarter of 2018, it pointed out, using the words “anaemic” and “sluggish” to describe its situation.

One reason for the lacklustre results might be that the company has simply stretched itself too thin. Over time, TripAdvisor has grown so large that it has become difficult to explain what it is, exactly: it’s not quite a social network, though it encourages users to “like” and comment on each other’s posts; nor is it a news site, though its business is staked on aggregating legitimate sources to provide an up-to-date portrait of the world; nor is it simply an online marketplace like its competitors Expedia.com and Booking.com. When TripAdvisor first started, consumer reviews were a new and exciting thing; now they are everywhere.

TripAdvisor used to promise its users a kind of escape, whether that be simply daydreaming over a vacation or actually booking one. The internet, too, has long been thought of as a place where one goes to get away from where one is. Travel and tech have both been championed as sectors where the normal rules do not apply – if what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, you might as well move fast and break things. Yet at a moment where such adages now seem horribly outdated, the future of TripAdvisor and similar enterprises seems less certain than it once did.

“My sense is that TripAdvisor, from a character perspective, is trying hard to do the right thing, but like all tech companies, they’re at the very first stages of the governance of how these things work,” says Rupert Younger, director of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation. “They didn’t construct these sites thinking they’d be catering to half a billion people.”

Shortly after I learned of Love’s story, I looked for her review on the page of the hotel in Mexico where she had been assaulted, and soon received an email from TripAdvisor inviting me to book a room there. Once you search for a destination on TripAdvisor, the company won’t easily let you forget it. “Ready to finalise your plans?” it read. A few weeks later, another email appeared: “Hi Linda. Book the best of La Paz.” I recalled my ill-fated trip to Bolivia and the attempted break-in. Another week passed, and another email came: “La Paz is selling out fast,” read the subject line. “Hi Linda. Don’t miss out on La Paz.”

This article was amended on 20 August 2018. The “iceberg problem” Bradford Young was referring to was not fake reviews, as an earlier version said, but the tendency of businesses to rush to litigation in order to protect their reputations.

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FACT SHEET: NEW YORK CITY TOURISM GENERATES $74 BILLION IN ECONOMIC IMPACT FOR STATE AND CITY ECONOMY IN 2023 

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New York City’s tourism industry continued to bolster the state and city economy in 2023, generating $74 billion in economic impact with more than $48 billion coming from direct spending (not adjusted for inflation). This activity supported over 380,000 leisure and hospitality jobs—roughly 9% of the City’s workforce—and thousands of small and minority-owned businesses across all five boroughs. Tax revenue, which totaled more than $6 billion generated by visitor spending, saved each New York City household approximately $2,000 in 2023.

Today, New York City Tourism + Conventions, the official destination marketing organization and convention and visitors bureau for the five boroughs of New York City, also released its final 2023 forecast, with the City attracting 61.8 million travelers in 2023, marking a recovery of 93% of the City’s record 2019 visitation levels.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: New York City is back! And this year’s tourism numbers prove our economic recovery is coming back stronger than ever,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams . “New York City’s tourism industry touches every corner of the five boroughs—supporting small and minority-owned businesses and more than 380,000 local jobs. We’re grateful to every single one of the 62 million visitors who brought in more than $74 billion in economic activity to our city this past year, and look forward to welcoming even more visitors next year.”

“Throughout 2023, New York City saw a continued return to pre-pandemic travel patterns reaffirming the industry’s place as a driver for the City’s economy with $74 billion in economic impact,” said New York City Tourism + Conventions President and CEO Fred Dixon . “Our city is as vibrant as ever. New attractions, cultural offerings, restaurants, a welcoming arrivals experience and more have helped NYC remain a top destination for domestic and international travelers.”

International and Domestic Travel

Domestic travel will reach 51.1 million in 2023, a 7.9% year-over-year increase over 2022.

International visitation, which accounts for nearly half of all visitor spending, will reach 10.8 million visitors in 2023, marking a 14.9% year-over-year increase.

As of December 2023, more overseas travelers hold valid US visas than at any point in history.

In 2023, New York City’s five largest international markets will be the United Kingdom (974,000), Canada (864,000), France (728,000), Brazil (589,000) and Germany (554,000).

Canada will reclaim its place as the second-largest international market. 

Western European markets regain their position as core markets for international travel to the City.

Economic conditions in South America remain mixed, however Brazil, Colombia and Argentina remain important feeder markets.

Asia-Pacific markets are returning at a slower pace due to distance, economic and access concerns.

The Chinese market is beginning to return as flight capacity increases; China was New York City’s second-largest overseas market in 2019.

Business and Leisure Travel

Business travel accounts for approximately 20 percent of all visitation to New York City annually; it was the hardest hit sector in the pandemic and continues to recover at a slower pace.

In 2023, business travel is expected to increase to 11.8 million, growing by nearly 3 million visitors.

Tourism Infrastructure

New York City remains the largest point of entry to the US. It operates the world’s busiest airport system, with more than 2,900 weekly flight arrivals across John F. Kennedy international Airport (JFK), Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR),

LaGuardia Airport (LGA) and Stewart International Airport (SWF). More flights arrive through New York City airports than any other destination in the United States.

Air traffic at LGA, JFK and EWR airports now exceeds pre-pandemic levels.

More than $20 billion in investments are being made across JFK, EWR and LGA airports to improve the traveler experience;

LGA is undergoing an $8 billion transformation to a single, structurally unified main terminal with better transportation access and first-class passenger amenities—the first complete rebuild of a US airport in over 25 years. All remaining construction is slated for completion in 2024.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in collaboration with American Airlines and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield Airports, is launching a $125 million commercial redevelopment initiative for Terminal 8 at JFK.

This project will introduce more than 60 new shopping and dining options, emphasizing local and diverse businesses, following a $400 million terminal expansion.

On January 12, 2023, EWR debuted the updated $2.7 billion Terminal A, offering 33 new gates serving Air Canada, American Airlines, JetBlue and United Airlines customers, directly connected to a multilevel parking facility.

EWR is also working toward a new 2.5-mile elevated guideway train system to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and ease traffic congestion.

The New York City subway system continued to rebound reaching a record 2.9 million paid rides on Saturday, December 9, representing the highest weekend day for ridership in four years.

Hotel performance remained strong in 2023, with an estimated 36.5 million room nights sold, approximately 8% below 2019 record levels.

New York City is again among the top three US markets and was the highest-performing hotel city in the US in the fourth quarter of 2023.

The demand for hotels remained strong and was supported by a steady increase in midweek business travel.

More than 70 new hotels creating more than 10,000 hotel rooms will be added to the City’s inventory in the next three years across the five boroughs.

Active or available hotel room inventory citywide continues to vary as hotels adjust to new marketplace conditions. As of December 2023, roughly 121,464 rooms were in active inventory.

Additional Insights

The arts and culture sector continued to see the opening of new venues and exhibits. Employment in the arts and culture sector grew by 7% year over year to approximately 84,800 jobs.

The 2022–2023 Broadway season saw 12.3 million admissions, 16.8% shy of the record-breaking 2018–2019 season pre-Covid (the last complete season before the shutdown).

Broadway attendance was up 6% from 2022, while total grosses increased by 9% to $11 million.

Looking ahead

America 250: In 2026, the US will celebrate 250 years since its founding. NewYork City will commemorate its status as the nation’s first capital, the birthplace of the American government and the place where the Bill of Rights was written.

FIFA 2026 World Cup: FIFAhas announced New York/New Jersey as a host city for the 2026 World Cup. Additional details will be announced in the coming weeks, including which games will be held in the area.

New York City is currently on track to welcome 64.5 million visitors in 2024.

Sources: The Broadway League, MTA, New York City Tourism + Conventions, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Tourism Economics, STR Data, U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of State

About New York City Tourism + Conventions : New York City Tourism + Conventions is the official destination marketing organization and convention and visitors bureau for the City of New York, dedicated to maximizing travel and tourism opportunities throughout the five boroughs, building economic prosperity and spreading the positive image of New York City worldwide. For all there is to do and see in New York City, visit nyctourism.com .

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The travel and tourism industry by 2030.

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Oscar White is the Founder & CEO of  Beyonk , the experiences booking platform: empowering events, activities & experience providers to thrive

The ever-increasing speed of technological advancements and changing consumer expectations makes it arguably more difficult to forecast the future of the tourism industry than ever before. However, looking at macro-trends, there is a clear direction of travel that could substantially change the industry as we know it. The trends favor the end consumers and organizations that, paraphrasing Darwin, are “most adaptable to change.” They will be more likely to survive and thrive. As an ex-strategy consultant and public speaker on digital and technology trends, and now running venture-backed, travel-tech startup Beyonk , here are my predictions for the state of the industry by 2030.

1. Customers will become empowered through more choice and control.

As the tech giants lead the way in designing products that provide the best customer experience, from Amazon with single-click buying of every sort of product to Uber with quick and simple pickups, our expectations continue to evolve. Customers will want more, in less time and with less effort. Millions of bookings, analyzed by Beyonk, show 65% of consumers book within 48 hours of their events and activities. This will likely shorten as the friction of finding and booking in-destination experiences reduces.

2. Connectivity will become commoditized.

Since 2006, the travel industry has benefited from the General Transit Feed Specification, a standard for how data is accessible across industry stakeholders. While it’s unlikely that the rest of the tourism industry will get a similar standard, connectivity will continue to grow between suppliers, resellers and customers. This is a natural evolution of the tourism industry and will likely continue to make consumers more powerful with their decision-making and as a whole, make it easier to find and book with long-tail providers or book multiple categories at once. A series of application programmable interfaces could give access to a large portion of the supply. Many online travel agents could then access similar supply, making branding, differentiation and customer experience even more important to compete.

3. Personalization will become more important.

With the explosion of available data, services that are able to meaningfully present the relevant data in a constructive way will probably thrive. The more companies can tailor their offering to suit personal preferences, the more they’ll win. From the pre-sales aspect, they’ll be able to target suitable audiences with a compelling offer and lead them into personalized customer journeys — from building itineraries to selecting the room package and flight.

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The challenge of Apple and Google changing their privacy policies and ability to use third-party cookies has made it more difficult to personalize offers, ads and communications to relevant audiences. Companies are investing more to build up more first-person data such as emails. But they are struggling too, as Apple has introduced masking and obfuscation of email addresses, including in-browser privacy protection, which masks users’ IP addresses. An opportunity for personalization may come through Web 3.0 — where each person could have a single profile that follows you across the internet, that can be shared to allow websites to show you content specific to your profile to give you the best browsing experience and allow you to control the data you share. Those who are able to keep responding to the ever-changing privacy changes, but still build out strong personalization strategies, will build more loyal customer bases, have more efficient spending and reduce the cost of acquiring new customers.

4. Online channels will become seamless with offline channels.

As augmented and virtual reality technology improves, the price point for such devices in this space will drop significantly. AR and VR will become the new way to experience destinations, travel and things to do. For the initial pre-buying process, there will be a more immersive experience, moving closer to a “try before you buy” approach, as witnessed in retail over the last decade, with more brands adopting such features. See my article, “Ecommerce Trends for the Tourism and Travel Industry,” for a more in-depth discussion of this.

It is clear we are moving toward in-destination experiences where you can have an overlay of reviews for each menu item, or have a virtual tour guide giving you tips wherever you are via your wearable device. We, as both consumers and providers, will become more equipped with data to have better experiences. Those organizations that can cater to a more seamless online and offline experience could win big.

While it’s impossible to predict the future, the trends suggest the future of the industry could be grounded in further maturity of timely, relevant data and making it consumable across channels to delight customers.

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Thomas Cook Travel Company Collapses, Stranding Thousands

‘we’re absolutely gutted’: travelers react to collapse of thomas cook, thousands of thomas cook customers were left stranded or had their vacations canceled when the tourism company abruptly ceased operations..

“They’ve literally barricaded the front gates. The coaches there, as you can see, trying to get in to collect people to go to the airports to leave to go home and management aren’t allowing it, because Thomas Cook have gone into administration and we’ve got people at the front there with their suitcases waiting to go home.” “We’re absolutely gutted. We’ve looked forward to this for a long time. And wish the government had maybe stepped in, somebody had stepped in, it could have been done, I think. But there’s nothing we can do now.”

By Ceylan Yeginsu and Michael Wolgelenter

• Sept. 23, 2019

LONDON — Hundreds of thousands of vacationers were left stranded when one of the world’s oldest tour companies, Thomas Cook, abruptly announced Monday, with some of its flights still in the air, that it was going out of business.

Amid scenes of confusion at European airports, British officials scrambled to bring home 150,000 travelers, chartering dozens of jets to bring people home from as far away as Malaysia. It was described as the largest peacetime repatriation effort in the country’s history.

The tour company, said that all its bookings, including flights operated directly by the agency, had been canceled. “We are sorry to announce that Thomas Cook has ceased trading with immediate effect,” it said .

With that, travel plans for hundreds of thousands were snarled, and tourism officials in vacation hot spots braced for a potentially devastating hit to their economies.

Thomas Cook was no ordinary travel company. Founded in 1841, it changed the face of British travel. Its ubiquitous storefronts specialized in low-cost package holidays that put beach vacations in exotic locales within the budgets of middle-income Britons.

So its demise felt a bit like the end of an era — and it seemed in keeping with the larger mood in Britain as the country moves closer to a withdrawal from the European Union.

Indeed, though the company’s brick-and-mortar business model was overtaken by time, some also saw in its travails early signs of Brexit damage to come. They said a weakened pound and uncertainty among would-be travelers had played a role in the collapse.

[ “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.” Read about how it all went wrong for a travel giant. ]

Many of the travelers affected on Monday were already abroad, and wondering how they would get home. Others found their vacation plans dashed.

Among them were Layton Roche and Natalie Wells, who booked flights more than a year ago from Manchester, England, to Kos, a Greek island, for their wedding this Friday.

“I have been awake for 28 hours now,” Mr. Roche, a 30-year-old civil engineer, said in a message on Monday, as he and Ms. Wells, 31, were on their way to Birmingham to seek an alternative flight.

The Britons stranded on holidays were among as many as 600,000 vacationers left high and dry worldwide. Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement that it had arranged 60 flights to get people home on Monday, and that the effort would extend until Oct. 6. It was unclear whether citizens of other countries could expect similar help.

“We will try our level best to get them home,” said Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “There will be plans ready to deal with that if it is necessary.”

If Thomas Cook’s customers were surprised, British officials had less reason to be. The government had refused to mount a financial rescue of the battered company; doing so, Mr. Johnson said, would create a “moral hazard” by encouraging other troubled companies to take undue risks.

It was unclear, however, what steps, if any, the government took to prepare for the possibility of hordes of stranded travelers.

Tremors from the collapse radiated across the world, to Malaysia and San Francisco, but were felt most acutely in Europe. In Greece, where 50,000 vacationers were expected to be repatriated to their home countries in the coming days, and in Spain, there were fears about the effects on their critical tourist industries.

In Crete, alone, the tour company brought 400,000 visitors this year. Michalis Vlatakis, the head of the Greek island’s union of tour operators, described its collapse as a “7-magnitude earthquake.”

Things were at least as dire in Spain, particularly in the Canary Islands and the Balearic archipelago. Together, they accounted for about 3.2 million of the 3.6 million passengers flying each year to Spain on planes owned or chartered by Thomas Cook, according to the Spanish National Airport Authority.

Beyond the chaos and disappointment for travelers, the company’s collapse put 21,000 jobs at risk.

The 178-year-old travel company had been in poor financial health for some time. It announced its closing after negotiations to obtain £200 million pounds, or $250 million, in emergency financing fell apart over the weekend.

Analysts said Thomas Cook, struggling with a debt pile approaching 2 billion pounds — nearly $2.5 billion — had failed to adjust to the changing times. While other travel companies went totally online, for instance, Thomas Cook held onto its extensive chain of storefronts.

“What everybody is not lending their thoughts to is that this has been a thoroughly badly run company,” David Buik, a financial analyst, said in an interview with LBC radio on Monday. “It has had far too many shops. The emphasis of the business has gone online.”

But the company also suffered from a number of factors beyond its control, particularly Brexit, the planned British withdrawal from the European Union, which has cut the value of the pound. That has discouraged travel and squeezed profits.

“If the majority of your business is in destinations which are in euros and you are against the backdrop where there is a lot of capacity and you cannot raise prices, then there is a cost squeeze,” Chris Tarry, an independent airline analyst, told the BBC.

Peter Fankhauser, the chief executive of Thomas Cook, said, “There is now little doubt that the Brexit process has led many U.K. customers to delay their holiday plans for this summer. ”

Mr. Fankhauser also cited a prolonged heat wave in the summer of 2018 that brought high prices in the Canary Islands, a popular destination for the tour operator.

Terrorism and political unrest in North Africa, Turkey and Egypt have also hit the operator particularly hard in recent years, analysts said.

Although as many as 600,000 Thomas Cook customers were traveling when it announced that it was closing its doors, it was unclear how many were actually stranded. Some of the company’s local partners said they were still operating.

Condor, a German subsidiary airline of Thomas Cook, for example, was requesting a bridge loan from the German government and insisted that it would continue to serve the 240,000 of its customers — not all of them vacationers — currently out of the country.

Because Thomas Cook customers are covered under a government insurance program , they are assured of refunds for canceled trips and repatriation free of charge. Those who bought only flights from Thomas Cook do not have the same protections and may need to rely more on personal travel insurance, if they have it.

The government insurance program also reimburses hotels for the cost of the customers’ stay, even if cut short. Some resorts, however, appear not to have gotten the message.

On Saturday, some British tourists described being stopped from checking out of their hotel in Tunisia over concerns the hotel might not be paid. They said they were essentially locked in until the matter was sorted out. Others were threatened with being kicked out, according to news reports.

While the government may be covering the cost of canceled vacations, it is not helping out with the cost of making alternative arrangements.

Mr. Roche and Ms. Wells, the couple planning to marry, had to pay an extra 4,000 pounds, or about $5,000, for alternative flights for themselves and some family members. And they were expecting to spend another £2,000, or $2,500, for their accommodations.

“I’m absolutely gutted,” Mr. Roche said.

Most of the couple’s guests, he said, could no longer attend the wedding because of the extra costs.

The failure of Thomas Cook touched off a debate in Britain over whether the government should have intervened to prevent the collapse.

Speaking to the British television network ITV, Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said that beyond the fact that “governments don’t usually go around investing in travel companies,” a bailout of Thomas Cook would most likely have only put off the inevitable by “stretching things out for a couple of weeks.”

“The company were asking for up to £250 million,” he said on “Good Morning Britain,” a news program. “They needed about £900 million on top of that, and they’ve got debts of £1.7 billion, so the idea of just spending taxpayers’ money on that just wasn’t really a goer.”

Mr. Buik, the financial analyst, agreed that the government was right not to step in, saying that the company had been “hanging on rags.”

Thomas Cook’s problems may prove a boon to other tour operators, particularly rival TUI, whose shares surged more than 8 percent in Monday trading.

Andrea Leadsom, the business secretary, said in a statement that the government intended to convene a task force to support the thousands of Thomas Cook employees who will lose their jobs.

“This will be a hugely worrying time for employees of Thomas Cook, as well as their customers,” Ms. Leadsom said. “Government will do all it can to support them.”

Reporting was contributed by Megan Specia and Iliana Magra from London, Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin, and Niki Kitsantonis from Athens.

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Most rich consumers plan to spend more on travel next year

A majority of wealthy travellers continue to prefer spending on experiences over goods, study finds.

Rochtaine Koh Samui in Bophut, Thailand, one of South-east Asia’s most prestigious private luxury retreats. PA

Global luxury travel is leaning more towards conscious tourism, wellness and meaningful human connections, according to a report released earlier this week Tuesday at the International Luxury Travel Market trade show in Cannes, France.

A majority of wealthy travellers continue to prefer spending on experiences over goods, found the report by American Express in partnership with Altiant, a luxury market research company.

Almost 60 per cent plan to spend more on travel in 2023, compared with only 10 per cent who say they will cut back.

The findings are based on Altiant’s survey of 1,200 high-net-worth individuals and affluent travellers in 14 countries in parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas during the second half of 2022. As such, it predicts which pandemic behaviours are sticking and which are vanishing alongside global entry restrictions.

Health and safety rank as the No. 1 factor in choosing a destination, a concern that looks here to stay post-pandemic. Safety includes both security concerns and fear of discrimination at a destination. Wellness remains a key driver in holiday planning for 61 per cent of respondents.

The message of a more sustainable and climate-conscious tourism industry coming out of the pandemic is resonating with luxury travellers, the results show. Just over 25 per cent indicate that the environment and sustainability are important to them, with the percentages higher for those under 35.

More than 70 per cent of respondents overall further state that seeing carbon emissions data on their flights or holiday picks is very or somewhat influential in their booking decisions.

But here is the conundrum: When they were asked what the deciding factors are in booking their next holiday, sustainability of a hotel ranks only seventh out of 14 options, evidence that the consumer intention-action gap persists when it comes to sustainable travel.

What is for sure: Domestic and regional trips will stick around in 2023, but the desire for more international travel will dominate, according to half of respondents who are now prioritising an overseas holiday over a backyard trip.

Up to 52 per cent plan to visit Europe, 41 per cent will visit the Americas, and 25 per cent plan to travel to the Middle East or Africa.

Additional results from the survey:

• Fifty per cent of respondents say they'll continue to make up for lost time and live out their extravagant travel dreams and bucket lists. However, 49 per cent indicate a mind towards flying less and staying longer.
• Forty-five per cent plan to take more eco-friendly trips next year, and that number jumps to 81 per cent for Chinese travellers. A little more than half are willing to pay up to 20 per cent extra for sustainable holidays.
• The preference for relaxing holidays continues — beaches and city breaks.
• Wealthy travellers from the Americas are expected to be the most bullish on spending.
• Two thirds of respondents plan to use a travel adviser, with flexibility and insurance cited as the primary reasons.

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Hotels, travel and tourism industry outlook

20 february 2024.

Our latest consumer outlook report gives a mixed picture for domestic and international travel in 2024. With another year of economic uncertainty ahead, consumers are feeling the pinch in their finances, and as a result, we’re likely to see the demand bubble that emerged post-Covid begin to deflate. However, with travel still one of the last areas that consumers are willing to cut back on, the desire for short breaks and holidays remains. Consumers are however likely to be more discerning with their plans. Particularly when it comes to cost.

Our hotels, travel and tourism  outlook gives insight into consumer demand for travel in 2024 and takes a closer look at industry performance indicators for the year ahead. 

Post-Covid demand for travel eases

Our survey results show a significant shift in travel intentions for 2024 compared to 2023. Across all demographics, there was a decline in the desire to take a holiday in the next year, except for short breaks abroad which increased slightly by 2%. This suggests that the 'revenge travel' trend that emerged after Covid-19 is fading away. Even high-income households, who have more financial resources have seen a reduction in intentions to travel. This group expressed that they are less likely to plan a long break overseas, dropping from 54% in 2023 to 43% in 2024.

Given the ongoing financial strain on consumers, it is not surprising that they are more reluctant to travel this year. One key factor is the increasing cost of flying. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported that air passenger travel prices in summer 2023 were 60% higher than before the pandemic in 2019, and 19% higher than in 2022. Although fuel prices are down from their peak, they are still much higher than pre-Covid, which means air fares will likely remain high in 2024, contributing to the decline in the appetite for overseas travel this year.

The desire to travel domestically has also decreased by an average of 3.5% compared to last year. This is especially noticeable among consumers who are more likely to travel – high earners. In 2023, 56% of households with an income of £80K or more intended to take a trip of five days or longer in the UK. This year, only 43% of respondents have the same intention. This decline in domestic travel demand could be related to the sharp increase in UK hotel prices in recent years. The RSM Hotels Tracker  shows the average daily rate for a hotel room in 2023 was 21% higher than before Covid. With rising costs having the most influence on consumer spending this year, it is likely that demand will weaken if rates continue to grow at the current pace.

With inflationary pressures easing and real wages growing, it would be expected that consumer sentiment towards travel will improve throughout the year. However, with lockdowns beginning to feel like a distant memory, and consumers no longer stuck within their own four walls, the experience-led spending trend we saw explode at the end of 2022 will likely begin to soften. For many, mortgage rate rises and rent hikes will exacerbate the prolonged drag on consumers’ finances. In our view, this means holidays – the ultimate discretionary purchase – will be impacted and see demand remain flat this year.

Travel disruption remains a key factor impacting demand

In Q3, 2023 (from July to September), UK residents made 28.3 million trips abroad. This was an increase of 9.6% compared to the same period in 2022, when 25 million trips were made. This number was still 6% lower than the pre-pandemic level of 30 million trips in Q3, 2019. One possible reason for this was disruption at major UK airports in August 2023, due to air traffic-control problems. The results from our survey support this with respondents indicating the top reason for changing their travel plans after booking was due to flight disruption or cancellations (27%). This result goes up to a third when we look at families in isolation - a key customer segment for the travel industry.

The pandemic had a severe impact on the airline industry, reducing demand and the supply of international travel. As demand recovers, airlines are facing challenges to restore capacity, routes and staff. With job vacancy pressures in the UK easing, but still much higher than we would consider normal, this may continue to cause flight disruptions throughout 2024 as supply continues to struggle to catch up with demand.

Railway strikes were the main factor affecting domestic travel plans this year, with more than 20% of consumers saying they would alter their plans due to industrial action. The dispute around pay and working conditions between Aslef, the drivers' union, and 14 train operators in England has not been resolved with the government, and more strikes are expected this year. With domestic travel disruption likely to continue, hotel operators should consider what impact this will have on them when reviewing forward bookings to help anticipate demand.

ESG credentials entice millennial and high-income travellers

The height of the cost-of-living crisis saw consumers' willingness to spend more on sustainable goods and services wane. However, with inflation easing our survey shows sentiment towards sustainable spending has improved by 4% on average when compared to last year.

Intentions towards spending on travel plans that have a better environmental footprint has increased marginally this year. 31% of respondents stated that their travel plans are influenced by their impact on the environment, compared to 29% in our survey last year. Similarly, 31% of consumers in our 2024 report said they would pay more to stay in a hotel that focuses on being environmentally friendly and is run sustainability.

Millennials and households with an income of over £80k are most likely to spend on sustainable goods and services. Sustainable spending behaviours across these groups carries through to their travel plans. 38% of Millennials say their travel plans are influenced by their impact on the environment, with this jumping to 58% for high-income households who say the same. We see similar intentions from these groups when we look at their willingness to pay more to stay in a sustainably operated hotel. 40% of Millennials agreed that they would pay more for environmentally friendly options, with 58% of households with an income of £80k or more saying the same.

Hotels, travel and tourism businesses have significant challenge when it comes to proving their ESG credentials. They consume considerable amounts of energy, employ vast numbers of people and for those operating in multiple jurisdictions or those that reach a certain turnover bracket, are liable to meet various reporting standards. However, despite these challenges, brands that prioritise sustainability will gain a competitive edge and attract those environmentally conscious travellers willing to pay more for aligned products and services. Even with difficulties associated in meeting ESG criteria and without a current industry standard to date, it is worthwhile for businesses to invest in improving their ESG performance and communicating it effectively to their customers.

Luxury travel benefits from the downturn of luxury goods

The pandemic resulted in a boom for many luxury goods businesses, as they saw record profits from high earners who had more disposable income and time to spend on home and fashion products. However, this trend is in decline, with many luxury goods businesses reporting a drop in demand for these items.

The hotels, travel and tourism  industry is benefitting from this downturn. As high-income households reduce their consumption of material goods, they are shifting their preferences to experiential services such as travel. For example, the proportion of high-income households who plan to increase their spending on short-term breaks has risen from 3% last year to 10% this year. This desire to retreat from everyday life and embrace experience spending has certainly benefited the UK luxury hotels sector.

The UK's luxury hotel sector enjoyed a remarkable recovery in 2023, with the average room rate reaching £327.33, a 35% increase from the pre-Covid level of £243.26. This reflects the return of inbound travel with the latest data from ONS in Q3 of 2023 showing overseas residents made 10.9 million visits to the UK during the period. This is a 10% increase on the same period in 2022.

The recovery of inbound travel can be seen not only in the number of visitors returning to UK shores, but most importantly in the amount of money they are spending. Visitor numbers are still 8% below where they were pre-pandemic in Q3, 2023 (11.9 million), however the amount these visitors are spending is considerably higher than pre-Covid. Estimated spending by overseas visitors to the UK for Q3 was £10.1 billion. That’s an increase of around 10% from Q3 in 2019 (£9.2 billion).

With 2024 forecasts for the number of visitors to UK shores increasing 5% to 39.5 million, we should continue to see increased spending from international visitors. In addition, high-earning UK travellers will spend more on short breaks away, meaning the UK luxury hotel sector should continue to see robust demand. This will allow the luxury sector to remain relatively insulated from cost-of-living pressures which have impacted room rates across the rest of the sector, and shelter them from higher running costs.

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To discuss this analysis, or any business issue you may be facing in the current climate contact our experts.

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Money latest: Popular restaurant chain launches legal bid over cockney rhyming slang for curry

Dishoom has launched a legal battle over the cockney rhyming slang for curry. Read this and the rest of today's consumer and personal finance news - and leave a comment - below.

Tuesday 21 May 2024 16:19, UK

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• UK economy heading for 'soft landing' but mistakes have been made, says IMF
• Good news for drivers as oil prices hit two-month low
• Dishoom launches legal battle over the cockney rhyming slang for curry

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Ask a question or make a comment

PrettyLittleThing has been reprimanded for posting "misleading" adverts, marking its ninth warning in four years. 

Complaints about the online fashion retailer were made following its Black Friday social media campaign in November. 

The Advertising Standards Authority investigated 15 posts on X, which mentioned several discounts ranging from 30% to 99%. 

PrettyLittleThing said the period had become well known to consumers in the UK as a time when business offered promotions. 

It also said its advertising and marketing was "reflective of what their customers wanted and expected", and "further terms and conditions were on their website".

However, the ASA found three issues with the campaign. 

It said some misled customers into believing all products were included in the promotion, when some were excluded. 

Others failed to specify when the deal ended, and some breached advertising rules with the "inclusion of closing dates from ads when promotional periods were shortened or extended". 

In previous rulings, the company was found to have: broken the ASA's rules on offence and responsibility by objectifying women; run social media partnerships with influencers that did not make clear they were ads; run promotions that had not been administered fairly.

"While one breach of our rules is one too many, the bulk of the rulings were between 2020-22," the ASA told the Money team.

"To date, two have been published in the last two years. We hope the downward trend in upheld rulings continues but will take action if we see any ongoing issues." 

Inflation is forecast to have fallen to around the Bank of England's 2% target in April - with an announcement at 7am on Wednesday.

A fall in the energy price cap at the start of April is a key reason - energy prices have been a driver of the huge price rises seen in the last two years.

The Bank itself forecast inflation could hit 2.1% for April - down from 3.2% in March and the 40-year high of 11.1% in October 2022.

Respected insights firm Pantheon Macroeconomics thinks it could hit 2% due to "four components"...

• Ofgem's 12.3% price cap cut that took effect in April will slice 40bp off CPI inflation;
• Food inflation shaves another 14bp off overall inflation, as fading commodity-price rises pass through to consumers;
• The BRC Shop Price Index suggests another fall in goods inflation, with help from weaker global costs, cutting headline inflation by 36bp;
• Services inflation is estimated to have fallen to 5.4% in April, from 6.0% in March - a range of items such as mobile bills and rents saw hikes, but these were less severe than those a year previously.

Industry figures released on Tuesday suggest food inflation is indeed falling...

The main upward driver of inflation in April was the price of petrol, which spiked during the month due to Iran-Israel tensions. 

Capital Economics also forecasts overall CPI could dip to 2% - and says we could see inflation at 1% later this year, lower than the BoE expects.

It thinks energy prices will keep falling and "that, in response to the previous falls in agricultural commodity prices, CPI food inflation will fall below zero". 

Inflation falls will influence how soon we get an interest rate cut - as rates are kept high in order to tame inflation by squeezing the economy.

The next Bank of England decision is on 20 June.

Pantheon says: "Markets are pricing a 60% chance of a rate cut in June and more than fully pricing one by August, so the key question is not whether the MPC will ease soon but how quickly it will cut again after the first reduction.

"We expect one cut per quarter to a 3.5% terminal rate, but with risks skewed to the BoE pausing temporarily at 4.0% to 4.5%."

Hotel Chocolat is to open 20 stores over the next 18 months and is expanding its online reach. 

The shops will open in retail parks and feature a different design concept. 

Speaking during Retail Gazette's Future Consumer Debate, the company's head of customer marketing, Amy Harman, said shoppers want to be able to see, smell and feel the chocolate they're buying. 

"That's very much what we’re looking to do in our stores," she said. 

Explaining the choice to target retail parks, she said that's where the footfall and demand is. 

"There's more intent with consumers. They're going for a day out and going for an experience," she added.

The announcement comes as the brand prepares to launch on TikTok shop in the coming weeks as it looks to expand its online audience. 

Dishoom has launched a legal battle over the cockney rhyming slang for curry. 

The restaurant chain, which can be found in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham, has asked for the term Ruby Murray to be freed up by the Intellectual Property Office. 

At the moment, a man named Tariq Aziz has the rights to the name for food and drink uses, with an IPO filing showing he registered the trademark in 2019. 

A search of the IPO site shows an application to revoke the trademark registration on the grounds that it has never been used was filed on 15 May by Dishoom Limited. 

Mr Aziz now has until 15 July to indicate whether he will offer a defence.

If he fails to do so, the trademark will be revoked and removed from the register. 

A Dishoom spokesperson told the Money team it doesn't believe the trademark's owner has ever used it. 

"There is a principle of 'use or lose it' in trademark law and we have therefore asked the UK IPO to remove the Ruby Murray mark from the register," they said. 

"Dishoom is not seeking to apply to register Ruby Murray in its own name; it wishes to remove the 'monopoly' on the use of Ruby Murray so it can be used freely by anyone when referring to curry." 

Dishoom does have a chicken ruby on its menu and in its cookbook and the Money team are big, big fans.

The International Monetary Fund has said the UK economy is heading for a "soft landing", but reiterated its message to Jeremy Hunt that he should not have cut National Insurance at the last two fiscal events.

In its annual check-up on the state of Britain's economy, the Washington-based Fund raised its forecast for gross domestic product growth this year from 0.5% to 0.7%, saying: "The UK economy is approaching a soft landing, with a recovery in growth expected in 2024, strengthening in 2025."

The Fund now expects inflation to come down to close to 2% in the coming months, and the Bank of England to cut interest rates by as much as three quarters of a percent this year, and then another percentage point next year.

The chancellor welcomed the Fund's Article IV report, saying: "Today's report clearly shows that independent international economists agree that the UK economy has turned a corner and is on course for a soft landing.

"The IMF have upgraded our growth for this year and forecast we will grow faster than any other large European country over the next six years - so it is time to shake off some of the unjustified pessimism about our prospects."

Government 'won't meet its debt target'

However, the IMF, which has warned the government explicitly in the past not to cut taxes too fast, in the face of rising spending projections in future, said the two 2p National Insurance contribution cuts at the last two fiscal events were a mistake.

"In light of the medium-term fiscal challenge", the report said, "staff would have recommended against the NIC rate cuts, given their significant cost."

The Fund's staff also believes the government is not on track to meet its main fiscal rule, which commits it to cutting the national debt in five years' time.

It believes net debt will carry on rising towards 97% of GDP in the following years, instead of falling back to 93% of GDP, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast.

The Fund's double-edged report comes amid improving news for the UK.

Data released two weeks ago showed the country ended its short-lived recession with faster than expected growth in the first quarter of the year.

The Office for National Statistics is expected to announce tomorrow that inflation dropped close to the Bank of England's 2% target in April. That may enable the Bank to begin cutting interest rates from their 5.25% level in June or August.

Bank should speak more

The Fund's report contained a number of other recommendations for economic policy in the UK, including that the Bank of England should commit to more news conferences to explain its decisions, and that the government should consider imposing road charges to replace the revenue lost from fuel duty as electric cars become more predominant on UK roads.

For many Britons, retirement means moving somewhere new.

New analysis from relocation experts Property Guides has found the easiest locations for retirees, taking into account culture, visa requirements, cost and more. 

Landing in the number one spot is Ireland, with a lack of visa requirements, English-speaking residents and relatively "safe and happy" environment.

Spain, Portugal and Cyprus claim the next three spots on the list.

However, Spain is high on the minimum annual income requirement.

"Spain's is one of the most expensive. It is currently around €27,000 (£23,000) per year for the first applicant. Just over the border in Portugal, it is less than €8,500 per year. Turkey's is the cheapest, working out at a little over £5,000, while Italy requires over €30,000," Property Guides says.

Turkey also came out well for the low cost of living - unlike New Zealand.

European countries in general offer visas aimed specifically at those receiving pensions or investment incomes, according to Property Guides.

Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada, however, actively restrict those over 55 from moving there, even if they have a high passive income (income such as pensions, that doesn't require a job). 

It becomes easier if retirees have children who are already legal residents.

"Golden visas", which encourage wealthy people to invest in a country, are becoming less common. 

"Most countries are now cancelling their residential investment option, including Cyprus and Portugal, and Spain will soon be closing its own. However, for now, you can still get one in Spain, Greece and Turkey, for as little as a €250,000 property, and these we have judged the easiest to retire to."

Property Guides also looked at health services. They took rankings from a Legatum Prosperity Index. 

"Top scorers were Germany, Italy and France, in that order. Bottom of the pile was the USA."

The research noted that state pensions are not uprated for retirees in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

It also factored in "sunshine hours", with the top three being Cyprus, Portugal and the US. Ireland came last here.

By Sarah Taaffe-Maguire , business reporter 

Good news for motorists: oil prices are at a more than two-month low at $83.08 for a barrel of Brent crude oil.

Lower prices will likely filter down to the pumps in about 10 days.

But it's not such good news for those in the Brixham area.

The parent company of South West Water - who supplies the Devon area - said 15% don't have normal service.

Shares in Pennon Group, which also owns Bournemouth Water and Bristol Water, fell 6.7% after it reported flat pre-tax profit - £16.8m was recorded for the 2023-24 financial year, the same as 2022-23.

That's despite shareholders being in line for a higher payout of 44.37p  a share.

Drug maker AstraZeneca is one of the best-performing stocks on the FTSE 100 index of most valuable London-listed companies today.

After it announced it aims to double revenues by 2030, the share price rose 0.53%. 

If you're buying dollars, you can get $1.27 for your pound or €1.17. 

By James Sillars , business reporter 

Grocery inflation has eased to its lowest level since October 2021, according to industry data released before official figures tipped to show a big dent in the overall pace of price increases in the economy.

Kantar Worldpanel - which tracks supermarket till prices, sales and market share - said its measure of grocery inflation slowed to 2.4% in the four weeks to 12 May from 3.2% the previous month.

The measure showed there is still upward pressure on the cost of items such as chilled fruit juices, drinks, sugar confectionery and chocolate confectionery - the latter a consequence of poor cocoa harvests.

Prices were still falling fastest in toilet tissues, butter and milk, the report said. It has previously pointed to wider assistance in falling costs from a price war among supermarkets.

Fraser McKevitt, Kantar's head of retail and consumer insight, said: "Grocery price inflation is gradually returning to what we would consider more normal levels. It's now sitting only 0.8 percentage points higher than the 10-year average of 1.6% between 2012 and 2021, which is just before prices began to climb.

"However, after nearly two and a half years of rapidly rising prices, it could take a bit longer for shoppers to unwind the habits they have learnt to help them manage the cost of living crisis."

Read more on this story below ...

Airbnb has the highest percentage of scam-related reviews, according to new data.

8.5% of comments left on the holiday-let site warned about scams, travel payment website PayFasto said.

Trivago came in second with 7.5%, Hotels.com third with 6.5%,  Myholidays in fourth with 6.1% and Booking.com fifth with 5.8%.

PayFasto says it is essential to do your research before booking a holiday online.

"Sometimes, if a deal looks way too good to be true, it often is," the company said. 

"Make sure you do research on the site and make sure they have legitimate ways to contact them if you were in the position where you needed to. If the site has no contact options, then this is certainly a red flag. "

It also warned holiday-goers to look for the ATOL (Air Travel Organisers' Licensing) scheme on websites, which guarantees customers protection separate from insurance when booking a package holiday that includes a flight. 

Sky News has contacted Airbnb for comment.

Basically, the FTSE (short for Financial Times Stock Exchange) is an index of the 100 largest companies by market capitalisation listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The index, operated by a division of the London Stock Exchange Group, is often referred to by its nickname "Footsie" and was created in 1984.

Among the companies in it are BP, HSBC, Barclays, Glencore and AstraZeneca.

Figures are reviewed every quarter. At each review some companies will exit and others will enter. Promotion and relegation, just like in league football for example, depends on performance.

The value figure presented in the evening is the closing value of the FTSE 100 for that day - representing the combined value of the top 100 companies.

How to invest in FTSE 100

You can buy individual shares of FTSE 100 companies via a share dealing platform.

There is stamp duty of 0.5% to pay on UK share purchases.

Once you've bought shares, you will need to keep track of the markets. If the shares you buy go up in value, you'll make a profit when you sell them subject to any fees.

Losses are only crystallised if you sell below the purchase price.

Tracker funds (open-ended investment companies or exchange-traded funds) provide the easiest way of investing in the FTSE 100.

Trading hours are Monday to Friday from 8am- 4.30pm.

You may have read about the FTSE reaching record highs in recent weeks - but the London-based index is actually a relative laggard this year compared with rivals in the US, Japan and Germany.

Membership arguably doesn't hold the prestige it once did - and an increasing number of major companies are citing the fact they could be valued higher as a reason for snubbing London.

Shell last month indicted it could abandon the city for New York for this reason.

Is it the top British companies?

The index is chock-full of companies that have little or nothing to do with the UK - such as Fresnillo, a Mexican gold and silver miner; Antofagasta, a Chilean copper and gold miner; and Ashtead Group, a plant and tool hire company which derives £90 in every £100 it earns from the US.

Even companies thought of as British, such as BP, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Shell and Diageo, the world's biggest scotch whisky and tequila producer, derive the vast majority of their earnings outside the UK. In fact, of the 20 biggest companies in the Footsie, only one - the Lloyds Banking Group - can be said to make most of its income in the UK.

For a better gauge of how corporate Britain is doing, investors are better off looking at the FTSE 250, the next biggest 250 listed companies on the London Stock Exchange and home to household names such as Bellway, Games Workshop and ITV.

Read other entries in our Basically... series:

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Statistics on " Travel and tourism in the United Kingdom (UK) "

• Travel and tourism's total contribution to GDP in the UK 2019-2022
• Distribution of travel and tourism expenditure in the UK 2019-2022, by type
• Distribution of travel and tourism expenditure in the UK 2019-2022, by tourist type
• Travel and tourism's total contribution to employment in the UK 2019-2022
• Median full-time salary in tourism and hospitality industries in the UK 2023
• CPI inflation rate of travel and tourism services in the UK 2023
• Inbound tourist visits to the UK 2019-2022, by purpose of trip
• Leading inbound travel markets in the UK 2019-2022, by number of visits
• Leading inbound travel markets in the UK 2023, by growth in travel demand on Google
• Number of overnight stays by inbound tourists in the UK 2004-2022
• International tourist spending in the UK 2004-2024
• Leading inbound travel markets for the UK 2019-2022, by spending
• Number of outbound tourist visits from the UK 2007-2022
• Outbound tourism visits from the UK 2019-2022, by purpose
• Leading outbound travel markets in the UK 2023, by growth in travel demand on Google
• Number of outbound overnight stays by UK residents 2011-2022
• Outbound tourism expenditure in the UK 2007-2022
• Domestic overnight trips in Great Britain 2010-2022
• Domestic tourism trips in Great Britain 2018-2022, by purpose
• Number of domestic overnight trips in Great Britain 2023, by destination type
• Number of tourism day visits in Great Britain 2011-2022
• Total domestic travel expenditure in Great Britain 2019-2022
• Domestic overnight tourism spending in Great Britain 2010-2022
• Expenditure on domestic day trips in Great Britain 2011-2022
• Average spend on domestic summer holidays in the United Kingdom (UK) 2011-2023
• Number of accommodation businesses in the United Kingdom (UK) 2008-2021
• Number of accommodation enterprises in the United Kingdom (UK) 2018-2021, by type
• Turnover of accommodation businesses in the United Kingdom (UK) 2008-2021
• Turnover of accommodation services in the United Kingdom (UK) 2015-2021, by sector
• Number of hotel businesses in the United Kingdom (UK) 2008-2021
• Consumer expenditure on accommodation in the UK 2005-2022
• Attitudes towards traveling in the UK 2024
• Travel frequency for private purposes in the UK 2024
• Travel frequency for business purposes in the UK 2024
• Share of Britons taking days of holiday 2019-2023, by number of days
• Share of Britons who did not take any holiday days 2019-2023, by gender
• Share of Britons who did not take any holiday days 2019-2023, by age
• Leading regions for summer staycations in the UK 2023
• Preferred methods to book the next overseas holiday in the UK October 2022, by age
• Travel & Tourism market revenue in the United Kingdom 2018-2028, by segment
• Travel & Tourism market revenue growth in the UK 2019-2028, by segment
• Revenue forecast in selected countries in the Travel & Tourism market in 2024
• Number of users of package holidays in the UK 2018-2028
• Number of users of hotels in the UK 2018-2028
• Number of users of vacation rentals in the UK 2018-2028

Other statistics that may interest you Travel and tourism in the United Kingdom (UK)

• Basic Statistic Travel and tourism's total contribution to GDP in the UK 2019-2022
• Basic Statistic Distribution of travel and tourism expenditure in the UK 2019-2022, by type
• Basic Statistic Distribution of travel and tourism expenditure in the UK 2019-2022, by tourist type
• Basic Statistic Travel and tourism's total contribution to employment in the UK 2019-2022
• Premium Statistic Median full-time salary in tourism and hospitality industries in the UK 2023
• Premium Statistic CPI inflation rate of travel and tourism services in the UK 2023

Inbound tourism

• Basic Statistic Inbound tourist visits to the UK 2002-2022
• Premium Statistic Inbound tourist visits to the UK 2019-2022, by purpose of trip
• Basic Statistic Leading inbound travel markets in the UK 2019-2022, by number of visits
• Premium Statistic Leading inbound travel markets in the UK 2023, by growth in travel demand on Google
• Premium Statistic Number of overnight stays by inbound tourists in the UK 2004-2022
• Premium Statistic International tourist spending in the UK 2004-2024
• Premium Statistic Leading inbound travel markets for the UK 2019-2022, by spending
• Premium Statistic Leading UK cities for international tourism 2019-2022, by visits

Outbound tourism

• Premium Statistic Number of outbound tourist visits from the UK 2007-2022
• Premium Statistic Outbound tourism visits from the UK 2019-2022, by purpose
• Premium Statistic Leading outbound travel destinations from the UK 2019-2022
• Premium Statistic Leading outbound travel markets in the UK 2023, by growth in travel demand on Google
• Premium Statistic Number of outbound overnight stays by UK residents 2011-2022
• Premium Statistic Outbound tourism expenditure in the UK 2007-2022

Domestic tourism

• Premium Statistic Domestic overnight trips in Great Britain 2010-2022
• Premium Statistic Domestic tourism trips in Great Britain 2018-2022, by purpose
• Premium Statistic Number of domestic overnight trips in Great Britain 2023, by destination type
• Premium Statistic Number of tourism day visits in Great Britain 2011-2022
• Premium Statistic Total domestic travel expenditure in Great Britain 2019-2022
• Premium Statistic Domestic overnight tourism spending in Great Britain 2010-2022
• Premium Statistic Expenditure on domestic day trips in Great Britain 2011-2022
• Premium Statistic Average spend on domestic summer holidays in the United Kingdom (UK) 2011-2023
• Premium Statistic Number of accommodation businesses in the United Kingdom (UK) 2008-2021
• Premium Statistic Number of accommodation enterprises in the United Kingdom (UK) 2018-2021, by type
• Premium Statistic Turnover of accommodation businesses in the United Kingdom (UK) 2008-2021
• Premium Statistic Turnover of accommodation services in the United Kingdom (UK) 2015-2021, by sector
• Premium Statistic Number of hotel businesses in the United Kingdom (UK) 2008-2021
• Basic Statistic Most popular hotel brands in the UK Q3 2023
• Premium Statistic Consumer expenditure on accommodation in the UK 2005-2022

Travel behavior

• Premium Statistic Attitudes towards traveling in the UK 2024
• Premium Statistic Travel frequency for private purposes in the UK 2024
• Premium Statistic Travel frequency for business purposes in the UK 2024
• Premium Statistic Share of Britons taking days of holiday 2019-2023, by number of days
• Premium Statistic Share of Britons who did not take any holiday days 2019-2023, by gender
• Premium Statistic Share of Britons who did not take any holiday days 2019-2023, by age
• Premium Statistic Leading regions for summer staycations in the UK 2023
• Premium Statistic Preferred methods to book the next overseas holiday in the UK October 2022, by age
• Premium Statistic Travel & Tourism market revenue in the United Kingdom 2018-2028, by segment
• Premium Statistic Travel & Tourism market revenue growth in the UK 2019-2028, by segment
• Premium Statistic Revenue forecast in selected countries in the Travel & Tourism market in 2024
• Premium Statistic Number of users of package holidays in the UK 2018-2028
• Premium Statistic Number of users of hotels in the UK 2018-2028
• Premium Statistic Number of users of vacation rentals in the UK 2018-2028

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