Greetings, travellers!

This edition of the Travel Talk newsletter is, as always, a mashup of opinion and commentary on travel articles that I found interesting (and I hope you do, too). Topics: how AI is creeping further into flight searches and ticket prices, why younger travelers are losing faith in automation, and what cities are doing to redefine livability. There’s also a great article on Chongqing’s vertical sprawl, Bhutan’s “anti-Dubai” experiment, and a few side notes on trains, TikTokers, and standing-room flights.

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Google Flights upgrade - AI flight search experiments

🔗 Google Blog​

Google has added Flight Deals to its Flights platform, an AI-driven search that interprets natural language requests like “a week in a city with good food this winter” and returns matching fares. The feature, now in beta, launches in the U.S., Canada, and India, while the standard Google Flights tool remains unchanged apart from a new option to filter out basic economy fares.

Let’s see if “AI” really means cheaper flights or just another way to funnel us back to the same ticket sites.

But always remember, folks, Google Flights should not be the only tool you use, especially for less visited countries and some non-US aligned countries.

Many travel bloggers talk about Google Flights as if it’s the final solution to finding flights. Nothing else needed, they say. It might be so. But not always.

Air China is not (always) on Google Flights. Two Albanian carriers do not appear. Some ultra low-cost carriers like Ryanair and Jet2 are not fully covered, or are completely absent.

The Bots Are Coming for Your Plane Ticket

🔗 TechRadar​

Flight prices are rising, and it’s not just fuel or demand. Bots (cheap, automated scripts) are flooding travel sites, creating fake bookings, scraping data, and inflating prices in the process.

Here’s how bots are affecting prices:

• Seat spinning: Bots start bookings but don’t pay, which lowers inventory and tricks pricing algorithms into raising fares
• Scalping: Some bots book flights just to resell them at higher prices
• API abuse: Bots overload search engines and loyalty systems, slowing or crashing websites
• SMS scams: High-volume message attacks rack up charges and delay real travel alerts

Chongqing: China’s Vertical City

🔗 The Straits Times​

About 75% of Chongqing is mountainous, so the city builds up instead of out. You can enter an old housing block on level 11 and exit on 16. Roads curl around ridges, metro lines cut through buildings, and bridges connect the valleys. Urban planners deal with the geography by creating independent hubs like Shapingba, though moving between them can still take hours.

Chongqing is now China’s fourth-largest economy, with 5.7% GDP growth last year. But that speed comes with debt problems, and Beijing has warned against overspending. None of that stops it from being a domestic tourist draw or from being branded online as China’s “cyberpunk city.”

I spent 8 days in Chongqing this year and loved it. The city is enormous, confusing, and brutally hilly. Getting around can be exhausting, even for locals. For casual tourists, that might be a deterrent but it hardly explains the almost total lack of Western tourists. (I saw only 2 in 8 days). Chongqing doesn’t have a single world-famous attraction pulling in tour groups. There’s very little English spoken here and few people outside of China know where the place is.

It’s a huge, crazy, fascinating city that doesn’t particularly care whether you’re there or not.

Why Bhutan is Building the Anti-Dubai

This is a rare look into Bhutan, a country that measures success not by GDP, but by the happiness and well-being of its people. The video looks at Bhutan’s bold plan to build the Gelafu Mindfulness City, an eco-conscious, spiritually infused urban experiment designed to fuse ancient wisdom with sustainable modernity.

Do Cities Live?

🔗 Sam Holden essay​

Sam Holden’s essay circles around a deceptively simple question: if a river can be alive, why not a city? Drawing from Robert Macfarlane’s animist-inflected Is A River Alive?, Holden pushes the idea into the urban world. He suggests that life in a city is not just something people inject into it but something that emerges in collaboration with streets, objects, rituals, and chance encounters

An example is how public baths are vanishing in Tokyo. Holden equates the loss with the killing of the city’s spirit. Development, like deforestation, can drain urban life-force.

I Skipped the ‘Most Scenic Train Ride in the World’

🔗 Escape – Sri Lanka’s Main Line railway​

I just couldn’t resist using this obnoxious YouTuber-style title. Sorry, not sorry.

Anyway, on paper this train journey looks absolutely stunning. No argument there. Sri Lanka’s Main Line railway, with its colonial-era charm and sweeping views of tea-clad hills, is the kind of journey that travel magazines get all excited about.

But I skipped it.

I just couldn’t stomach the idea of spending nine hours in a slow-moving steel box with a herd of influencers dangling out of the doors like Labrador puppies on a car ride.

In modern travel, a place that is considered stunningly beautiful can attract a crowd that treats the journey like some kind of background screen.

And this is hardly "adventure travel". The most dangerous part of the train ride is avoiding smacking your head on ring lights and tripping over tripod legs in the aisle.

Speaking of influencers ...

Travel Tiktokers

Here's a spot-on parody of every TikToker touchdown in Thailand over the past five years.

🔗 Oh my God, guys.. they have carrots here​

Pilot Answers 17 of the Internet’s Most Asked Flight Questions

Captain Steve is a commercial pilot with a popular YouTube channel. In this video, he answers the kind of flying questions you might suddenly have when the seatbelt light comes on or while your plane is in a holding pattern. Anyone who has ever flown on an airplane will find something interesting in this.

Flying Cheap & Vertical

🔗 Thrillist – standing seats on budget airlines

A group of European budget airlines are reportedly experimenting with replacing standard airline seats with what can only be described as “airborne bike saddles.”

Why would people want this? Well, it’s cheaper. And people want that more than anything else. Super-cheap fares as low as €5 for short-haul flights. Back to the good/bad old days of Ryanair giving flights away like there was no tomorrow.

This article points out what I’ve always felt once the buzz of my first air travel experience wore off: flying sucks. It’s already a crap experience so why not make it 10% more crappy but almost eliminate the airfare?

The thinking seems to be: make it just bad enough to tolerate, but cheap enough to justify.

This article also sends us a warning. As with all things airline-related, there’s a risk that once they’ve trained us to accept the sky perch, prices will climb again. And then we have an even less comfortable setup.

Of course, this is all subjective. As someone who is uncomfortable sitting for longer than a few hours, standing for an entire flight doesn’t feel so bad. But I’ll reserve this judgment for when I get to experience a flight.

Flying is somewhat joyless, so why not trade a bit more discomfort for big savings?

How do you feel about this?

Gen Z’s AI Travel Hangover

🔗 YouGov Report​

Calling a 12-hour stopover in an airport terminal a “connection” misses the point. People want trips, not endurance trials, and that gap between what the system delivers and what travelers expect is where trust evaporates.

Wanderlust Visions 2025 – Submissions Open

🔗 Wanderlust Magazine

If you think your shots of monks, markets, or mountain goats deserve more than Instagram likes, here’s a competition worth entering.

The Wanderlust Visions competition, formerly known as Travel Photo of the Year, is now accepting entries for 2025. It includes separate categories for photography and video. The competition has been running for 28 years and is open to both amateur and professional travellers.

• Winners of the photo and video categories will be sent on assignment to Abu Dhabi in 2026, in partnership with Experience Abu Dhabi
• A total of £12,000 in cash prizes will be divided among first, second, and third-place winners in each category
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The Smart Traveler’s Guide to Skyscanner Features You’re Ignoring

🔗 Dollar Flight Club

Are you a Skyscanner or Google Flights person? Or maybe you use something else (Kayak, anyone?)

If you’re not sure how Skyscanner actually works beyond typing in dates, this article breaks down the process of finding cheap flights on the platform. It basically explains what the buttons do.

Where Everything Works and No One Shouts (no, it’s not Japan)

🔗 Financial Times

For the eighth year in a row, Finland is the world’s happiest country. Its capital reflects that mood through a quiet, steady rhythm. Life here is clean in the truest sense. Tap water tastes like it came from a glacier. The air carries pine and sea. Public transport arrives when it should.

Helsinki feels like a city designed by someone who actually asked the locals what they wanted. No chaos. No neon skyline. No influencer food tours (probably).

Happy travels,

Keith

If you found this newsletter useful or entertaining, you might want to take a look at these tools I recommend. They help the words flowing. Or just hit reply. I’m always interested in hearing your thoughts, whether it’s about the newsletter or travel in general.

• ​Dollar Flight Club - Get the world’s best email on flights.
• ​Ratepunk - A Chrome extension that finds you the best prices on hotels, Airbnbs, and more
• ​Lingopie - Learn a language through real-world TV shows and movies. It’s one of my favourite platforms for picking up new languages while getting a genuine sense of the culture.
• ​Daily Drop - Track award flights and hotel redemptions across dozens of programs in one go. It’s a serious tool for travellers who want to use points without spending half their life on spreadsheets.