At the invitation of Travel Weekly, the world's leading publishers of consumer travel information gathered in New York to join in a discussion on the evolution of the travel guide. Present were Arthur Frommer, founder of Frommer's Travel Guides, which publishes 340 titles; Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet, the world's largest publisher of guidebooks; Tim Zagat, co-founder of Zagat Surveys, which distills consumer feedback on restaurants, hotels and attractions into ratings and commentary; Steve Kaufer, founder of TripAdvisor, the most popular Web site for user-generated travel advice; and Patricia Schultz, whose "1,000 Places to See Before You Die" (Workman Publishing, 2003) has sold 2.5 million copies.
The discussion was moderated by Travel Weekly's vice president and editor in chief, Arnie Weissmann, co-founder of Weissmann Reports, the leading provider of destination information to the travel industry.
(Editor's note: The original transcript has been edited for length, and the chronology has been altered to keep dialogue about specific topics together even though the topic may have recurred at different points in the course of the conversation.)
Weissmann: None of us at this table was a travel expert when we started producing our guides. We were travelers who believed we could fill a gap in travel information. Does one really need to be a professional travel writer to review hotels or restaurants or destinations?
Wheeler: Isn't this the kind of question that gets asked all the time of Wikipedia? You know, the Wikipedia-Britannica comparison. I'm generally impressed with Wikipedia.
Kaufer: You can read a hotel review that says, "I've stayed in six different hotels in Paris, and this is my favorite, and here is why," and then it's matched by a lot of other people who may have stayed there once or may have stayed there numerous times.
Zagat: When you have large quantities of people contributing information, it's a way of testing against comments that are out of the ordinary. If people are rating a restaurant an average of, say, 15 for food, and then you suddenly get a bunch of 30s, that doesn't look right.
Weissmann: If a consumer sent something to the Zagat Survey that struck you as insightful and authoritative, but was the only person to voice that opinion, would you print it?
Zagat: If the opinion says what other people are saying, or more or less says what people are saying, we will print it. And we like to find opinions that are especially well said.
Weissmann: So if somebody had an observation that struck you as insightful, but they were a minority of one ...
Zagat: We would not print them. We never print a minority of one. But you don't find that. What you find is that there are themes. I mean, these reviews practically write themselves.
The average restaurant in New York has got 1,000 comments on the survey, but the first 100 people say it all, and the others say the same things again and again and again. Pick a restaurant. How many ways can you describe it? Or a hotel?
Frommer: Wasn't it Ibsen who said that the majority is always wrong?
Would you not rather rely on the prognostications or the appraisals by Frank Bruni, the ...
Zagat: No.
Frommer: ... restaurant critic ...
Zagat: No.
Frommer: ... of the New York Times ...
Zagat: No.
Frommer: ... than on 100 New Yorkers ...
Zagat: No.
Frommer: ...who have no ...
Zagat: No, no, I would absolutely not, and I will tell you why. First of all, 100 people who filled out our surveys on a specific restaurant will have gone there an average of 11 times each. That means the restaurant has been visited 1,100 times. Frank Bruni has to write another review next week, so he goes once, twice, three times, maybe four.
Frommer: But Frank Bruni has a basis for comparison.
Zagat: What the hell does he have? A PhD in taste buds?
Frommer: He has spent a lifetime eating in restaurants.
Zagat: So have most of our friends, so have most of the people at this table. I've been eating out for the last 40 years.
Frommer: You have a highly developed palate.
Zagat: But almost all my friends basically eat out all the time. They are living in a world where they don't have time to cook at home. The average person filling out our surveys eats out four days a week and has been doing it for 20 years. Now I think that entitles them to some credit in terms of knowledge.
Second, they're not recognized, as Frank Bruni is most of the time when he walks into a restaurant. So they don't get treated in a special way.
Third, they are there every day of the week, and they're dealing with everybody on the staff, and they are eating everything on the menu.
Frank Bruni can only eat a certain number of things, and if he goes in June and it's hot and humid, he doesn't feel the same way as he would if he were eating in September. And the food comes from local farm fields in September, and in June it comes from Florida or California. He's eating different things. The whole experience is different. And especially when you are sitting there feeling like you have to write 1,000 words about it, it's not fun anymore.
Frommer: The average person who contributes to a user-generated site on an international destination has been to that destination exactly once in their life. And they sit down and condemn a Parisian restaurant in which they have eaten, and send in their comments to a user-generated Web site, and I am saying that I would rather rely on Frank Bruni.
Zagat: We have 5,000 people in Paris who live in Paris and mostly report to us in French.
Kaufer: It's just a different slice. There is certainly a segment of the population that is going to care what the restaurant critic, what the professional writer has to say about it, and they will read professional opinions.
Weissmann: Let's shift gears for a second. Patricia, your book is not a guidebook in the traditional sense, but it does make specific travel recommendations and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 200 weeks. What was it about your book that struck a chord with travelers?
Schultz: I, too, have a hard time pinning down its success. I think it's the baby boomer -- you know, the 80 million of us who are very aware that this is no dress rehearsal, that time is limited. So whether you're taking a vacation or are early retirees who are suddenly with a whole lot of time and little understanding about what are the standout places you must see, well, time is precious, and I think the whole idea is that there is no guarantee, so carpe diem. The title very much plays into our fear of, not dying, but not having lived.
Weissmann: Has anyone ever told you they've used your book as a guidebook, as opposed to reading it as an armchair traveler?
Wheeler: And are there many people saying, "I've done all 1,000, and I need another 500"?
Schultz: People come to me and say, "I've only done 263, but I'm working on it." And there was the 90-year-old lady I met in Machu Picchu who said she came there because she saw it in my book, and I'm thinking, "She didn't know it existed?"
The question I get the most is, "What is your favorite of the 1,000 places?" I wrote about Italy for Frommer's for a good number of years, and I am of Italian heritage, and the answer is always Italy.
Weissmann: Arthur, you've got the longest perspective on the evolution of guides. I would think that perhaps you would have found the time gap between the writing and the eventual publication of a printed guidebook frustrating. Did you initially see the Internet as a boon for travel guide producers because information could be distributed so much more quickly?
Frommer: I did see that the Internet would give us more up-to-date information, that it could capture, say, changes in ownership, changes in policy that can occur just two or three days prior to the person's trip.
But I felt, and I believe, that a large percentage of the public still values reading a book in which an expert makes choices for you and recommendations for you and tells you how to make use of your time. Tells you what establishments are worthy of visits and which aren't, what you should see or do if you are two days in a particular city, or if you have three days.
We find that the advice that a travel guide gives about how to make use of time is now regarded by the public as perhaps one of the most valuable features. The public values the assistance of someone, of a personality who appears in the guidebook, who is opinionated, who has strong viewpoints on the pros and cons of different methods of approaching a particular destination. This is the policy that we have been following for a long, long time, and that we're continuing to follow.
The good travel writers develop a reputation, their books go into 10, 12, 14 yearly editions. The guides are becoming ever more specialized, probably the single biggest trend in guidebook publishing today. We see that no longer does one size fit all.
We used to bring out just a guidebook to France. Now, we have a guidebook to Brittany, we have a guidebook to Normandy, we have a guidebook to Provence.
Weissmann: Do you produce books for various reader demographics, too?
Frommer: We are bringing out a guidebook to the Balearics, not only limited to these islands off the coast of Spain but for families visiting these islands. We have at times experimented with guidebooks for handicapped people.
Our authors express personal judgments and opinions of the sorts that you don't find on the Internet. You find on the Internet, in most cases, simply standard data presented as part of a database. You find it set forth in most cases without personality, without judgment, without personal communication.
Weissmann: Putting the expertise and voice aside for the moment, what about the immediacy of the Web, the immediacy of information being updated continually?
Schultz: I could read a response from someone who returned three days ago from Rome who told me not to bother going to the Piazza Navona because the Four Rivers statue in the middle of the piazza was under wraps. That's so ... of the moment. That's not reflected in most guidebooks because of the sequence of when you submit (a manuscript) and when it's produced and when it's released. The covering of the statue has come and gone in the meantime, so that's invaluable.
Wheeler: You have to be very careful about that. One of the things people think [is that] if it's on the Web, it must be happening right now. You know, sometimes it's on the Web, and this is a Web site that hasn't been updated for three years. At least with a guidebook, you know that it says 2006.
Schultz: Not necessarily.
Zagat: First of all, I don't think anybody could disagree with Arthur. Books are here, they've always been here, and they don't seem to be going away. Our books are doing just fine.
Are any of us who publish losing market share since the Internet came up?
Frommer: The answer is no.
Zagat: I'm not.
Frommer: Isn't that amazing?
Kaufer: Tony, do you think Thorn Tree (the section of the Lonely Planet Web site where readers share travel tips) helps sales of the guidebooks?
Wheeler: I think it does. I mean, I use it a lot if I'm going somewhere unusual.
Zagat: Arthur, one thing I don't agree with you about: A lot of the sites have incredible personality and say things that nobody would dare say in a book.
Schultz: That's true.
Zagat: And I have, off and on, had issues around that as a lawyer. We have a catalog of things called "outtakes," which are really things that we decided were so clearly libelous that we would not print them next to the name of the restaurant. But they are goddamn funny. Can I tell you a couple? "This restaurant suffers from delusions of adequacy." "Also known as Ebola Cafe." "I took a doggie bag home ... my dog refused it."
One I thought was really kind of dangerous was for One if by Land, Two if by Sea, a very romantic restaurant in Aaron Burr's old carriage house in the [Greenwich] Village. People have said "wonderful beef Wellington" and commented on the gardens and the fireplaces and the candlelight and music, and then one quote was, "If this place doesn't get you laid, nothing will." I thought that was a little risque.
Schultz: Uh, yeah.
Zagat: And I went to the women editors and I said, "Do you find that this is too risque to print?"
Wheeler: "Or do you find that it's true?" (laughter)
Zagat: They said, "Don't worry about it." And after it was printed, we received 200 letters saying it was absolutely disgusting that we did this, and they all came from women's clubs in the suburbs. But the angriest letter we got was from a guy who said it hadn't lived up to our representation. The big problem on the Internet, and this is from a legal standpoint, is that as soon as you start editing the content and you start changing what people say, you become liable for what is ultimately there. I think that's a real inhibition.
Kaufer: I think we probably would have printed or published all of those examples except for that last one, which might not have made it past our family-friendly filter. Yet, you get some astonishing comments, and the hotel really is exactly like what they're saying. On our site, you also get photos, and I can tell you that one of the most popular things for people to do is look at photos that are grainy and shot with lousy light, but they are of the bedroom of the hotel just as the people saw it when they walked in. It's the view out the windows that sometimes just doesn't quite match the brochure.
Weissmann: Tim brought up something interesting a few minutes ago when he said that most people submitting surveys on Parisian restaurants are doing so in French. Do you find that travel preferences differ depending on where people are from? How do you handle that if you have a global platform?
Kaufer: That's an excellent question that we wrestle with because we will collect reviews on the same hotel in French, German, Italian, Spanish and English. Currently, we'll roll all of those up into a single review score. That's not the right answer for everyone.
It might be perfect as the first cut, but really what we want to get to, and what any other user-generated site wants to get to, is what people like me, with my traveling habits, my nationality, my age think about a specific hotel.
Weissmann: Tony, you initially targeted a specific type of traveler: backpackers. But they were from all over -- Australia, the U.S., the U.K. -- and there was just one book for all of them on each destination.
Wheeler: We still produce books that are aimed very much at the young backpackers, the shoestring travelers as well as books that are much more general. There is a difference, and I remember once talking with some travel publishers of different nationalities, and the French were saying, "We have to have better coverage of restaurants in the French guides of course, and better coverage of the cinema," and the German getting up and saying the railway time tables have to be accurate, and it was a quite different perspective in that way. But in the end, people are people. I think you know you will probably find more similarities between a young German and a young Frenchman and a young American than you will between people of those nationalities in an older age group.
Weissmann: Travel agents, another group that gives travel advice, often specialize and may target a specific age group, region or style of traveling.
Kaufer: When I head to a travel agent vs. the Internet or a guidebook, I still head to that agent for personalized recommendations. If I am lucky enough to have an agent that's really gotten to know me and the family and our travel habits and styles and desires, then that agent can inspire where I should go.
When I walk into a bookstore to buy a guidebook, I'm like, well, there's a book on family vacations in Orlando. Maybe there are good family trips in it, but that book can't possibly know anything about me and the fact that I have four kids and one is an 8-year-old. The details. The agent will know by asking me a couple of questions, and then I look around at Web sites and, you know, there's a ton of Web sites with a boatload of great information, but not yet tailored toward me. Talk about opportunity!
Weissmann: How many of you use travel agents?
Zagat: Not always, but a lot.
Weissmann: Tony's raising his hand, Patricia is shaking her head, Arthur's shaking his head.
Schultz: We are our own travel agents, I would like to think.
Zagat: I love my travel agent.
Schultz: You're keeping her in business.
Zagat: This is somebody who has known us for years and knows what we're like, and she just makes everything happen well, and she takes care of it in a very professional way. I don't think I could do it as well, even with the professional people in my office.
Frommer: There was always a certain antagonism between our guidebooks and the retail travel agent. Most retail travel agents feel that we encourage do-it-yourself travel, that we turn people away from the travel agent to making their own decisions.
Of course, we haven't caused that type of traveler; there is a type of traveler who simply determines that he wants to travel independently and doesn't use a travel agent and sometimes doesn't even travel with advance reservations.
In the early days of Frommer's Travel Guides, I used to be physically ejected from the offices of some retail travel agents. Do-it-yourself travel was looked upon as a great threat at that time to the retail travel agent. I think people have calmed down since, but there has never been a close relationship between us and the other elements of the organized travel industry, which I think is a shame.
I think that a great many hotels and other travel products have passed up a good source of business by not bringing their facilities to our attention. Very rarely do I get a letter saying, "Send your writer to see us. We have this type of price which is perfect for you." That happens much more seldom than you would think.
On the other hand, I sort of value the fact that we are not in the pockets of the organized travel industry, that we are independent journalists who want to approach our subject matter exactly as a newspaperman would approach his.
Weissmann: But you were a tour operator for a period, weren't you?
Frommer: Oh, I was a tour operator for several years. Yes, I had a tour operator side-by-side, but of course the books were never involved in the tour programs or vice versa.
Travel guides, I think you will all agree, are for the totally independent traveler. They are rarely purchased by the person who goes on an escorted group tour, certainly. [To Wheeler:] Group tour passengers don't buy Lonely Planet guides?
Wheeler: Not usually.
Frommer: In rare situations.
Wheeler: But some people traveling on something that's totally organized still want information on what they are seeing and doing.
Weissmann: How do you use travel agents, Tony?
Wheeler: For complex trips. It's one thing to know you want to go from A to B, and you know you can get the best price going on the 'Net, but if you are going from A to B, B to C and C to D, as soon as it gets complex like that, then a travel agent still ...
Schultz: If you are lucky enough to find [one of] those dwindling few travel agents who is truly special.
Zagat: There are a lot out there. I just wanted to say we have thousands of travel agents who participate in certain of our travel surveys, and we value that information, that professional information, very much.
Weissmann: Patricia, you are in a demographic that uses travel agents, but you personally don't. Why not?
Schultz: Well, it all depends on, very much, the individual and their needs. I often do something very straightforward because of my time constraints.
You know, I don't have six weeks to tour Europe or to tour Africa or all of South America, so I'll go to Buenos Aires and Patagonia for 10 days, and when you have that restricted an area, it's very easy to navigate by yourself. And, I don't think you need to rely so much on a travel agent. Or, I just do research. I'm a real research buff.
Weissmann: Do you use Steve's site for research?
Schultz: I found the best tour guide in Cuba through TripAdvisor, and I went by myself. Always the independent traveler. But I find that if it's a very convoluted trip, then I probably would be more inclined [to use an agent], but I don't know quite where I would look because the more convoluted or specialized, the more difficult to find that agent.
In order to survive, haven't most travel agents specialized in African safaris or Southeast Asia or adventure travel, etc.? What if adventure travel is just one component of a trip to four different countries?
Wheeler: Very often, I'll do some things through a travel agent, but on the same trip I'll do some of it myself. I may be using one travel agent for one thing and another travel agent for something else, and then a couple of flights here and there. It's a combination.
Schultz: I think the average traveler, what with this wealth of guidebooks and technology on the Internet, I think they have just become too savvy.
Wheeler: They can pick and choose.
Schultz: They take pride in organizing their own trip.
Kaufer: Or, as you say, it's a combination. Before my most recent cruise, I did a ton of research online. In fact, we ended up buying one of the companies that I used, Cruise Critic, a great site for cruise reviews.
But I then made the booking offline because I wanted to actually talk to someone who knew more about this particular ship and who would be able to make this large-scale group reservation.
Schultz: But you ultimately go to the travel agent as an educated, individual, independent consumer/traveler.
Kaufer: I knew that agent knew cruises quite well.
Schultz: So, you're a wonderful match because you know what you want generally, and you're pretty much making things quite easy for them.
Zagat: Yeah, if he likes them, he buys them. It's great. They love him.
Schultz: And you just look to them for confirmation that you are on the right track, that what you are looking for exists and this is where to find it, and they ultimately do the final magic to make it happen.
Weissmann: Steve, you don't take reservations on your site, but you have advertising links to companies that do. Is that right?
Kaufer: Yes, our model is purely media and no subscriptions. It's free to travel agents to come and learn about a destination that the consumer is asking about, and if someone wants to reserve a room or a cruise or whatever, they can click on an ad.
Weissmann: Whereas your owner, Expedia, is a travel agency and does take reservations. How does that influence you, both in terms of transactions and content?
Kaufer: Not at all. Expedia was a client of ours, along with Travelocity and Orbitz and Priceline and everyone else, before we were acquired, and Travelocity, Priceline and Orbitz are still clients.
The acquisition really hasn't affected our business model at all. You know, that was practically part of the terms of the acquisition, and they're smart people at Expedia, and they know that for a media business to succeed, we have to be impartial.
Weissmann: Does anyone else's Web site have links to advertisers who take bookings?
Frommer: Yes, you can use our Web site to make bookings through Travelocity, actually. Their icon is on our Web site, and if a person wants to book, they can go to Travelocity.
But we don't get paid per transaction. They pay us as an advertiser. They've taken space on the Web site.
Weissmann: Tony, how about on your Web site?
Wheeler: We have some advertising.
Zagat: It seems to me that it's just sensible. When you give people the information and they reach a conclusion about what they want to do, you don't make them get offline and go to the telephone and go somewhere else to make the transaction if you can give it to them right then and there with a single click or two.
Schultz: It's like one-stop shopping.
Kaufer: What we found is that a large portion of our visitor base -- 2 million people a day -- are coming and just reading. They are not actually ready to buy something.
But of that subsection that is ready to express interest in a booking, they are not clicking on just one link; they are price-checking.
They are clicking on the Expedia link, the Hotels.com link, Travelocity, Orbitz, and they are seeing what's out there.
Weissmann: What sort of insight have you gained about someone who is in the trip-planning process?
Kaufer: There is a set of our audience that basically says, "Give me a fax number, give me a summary, I'm done." And they are not planning a big trip. They might be looking for that one-week, all-inclusive in Cancun, and they really do care about which hotel they are staying at. They read very little, but through the click trail we see that they appear to be happy. They've read some reviews, they've gone to make the booking.
And then there is the other extreme. They are just living on the site. They're clearly not planning a trip because they are there week in and week out, and they are vicariously enjoying reading other people's comments. We have someone in New York who is up to close to 20,000 posts now. More power to 'em.
Frommer: Steve, we hear that the PR agencies have devised a tactic known as buzz marketing, in which employees of a particular commercial establishment are encouraged to write in complimentary appraisals of that establishment or to knock the competition.
How do you weed out the effects of buzz marketing?
Kaufer: To the degree that someone is trying to promote a commercial establishment in our forums, it's just against the guidelines.
If they are casually offering a recommendation in our forums in response to someone else's question, we might not notice anything at all.
But a forum is meant for an interactive conversation, and there's a lot of back-and-forth. You're up to 200 reviews on a particular property, and consumers are actually remarkably good at sifting through what sounds like buzz and what sounds like a real review.
So, to directly answer your question, we have a small team of people who do nothing but aim for fraud detection. We think we do a pretty good job, though obviously not complete.
Weissmann: On what are the next generation of guides going to focus? What's not being done that people would like to see?
Wheeler: I think what Arthur was saying before: You don't just do a guide to France. You do one for kids. You do one for luxury. You do one for regions. Everything these days is a niche in some way or other.
I've often thought that when it's the right time for an idea, several people think of it at the same time.
We started the same year as Moon Publications started -- Bill Dobb put his first book out about six weeks before us. Insight Guides in Singapore started a couple of years before us, Rough Guides a year or two afterward.
The next new approach to guidebooks? These sorts of ideas, they don't come from publishers. It's like what happened with computer books.
When computer books came along, there wasn't a single publisher who thought, "We should do books about computers." It was all those computer nerds who said, "We should do books to keep it going."
Frommer: It is entirely possible that in the future, travel guides will be custom-tailored to the needs of particular families with particular interests.
Guidebooks are getting more and more specialized, and there's a greater emphasis in our guidebooks on the travel experience as a learning experience.
The American public is becoming less and less interested in the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. They have seen that, and now they are returning and want ever more profound and authentic experiences.
The person who buys a guidebook is not like the person who goes to a Caribbean island just to veg out on the beach for a week or to stay at an all-inclusive hotel.
In a few years, the printed guidebook may be replaced by an e-book, may be replaced by a single piece of electronic paper that is capable of holding up to 40 guidebooks that can be easily portable and taken with you on your trip.
Wheeler: The volume of information that can be compressed down, that is quite true. You won't have to carry around a half-dozen guidebooks. You will have it all on one little disc.
Zagat: The technology has improved greatly over the last five years.
Wheeler: But it's still not there yet. There's not a compelling medium yet to put guidebooks onto. I've looked at guidebooks on phones. Do you want to read something on a cell phone? No, you do not.
We've done a project recently with Sony -- guidebooks on Sony PlayStation portables. I tried those out, but again, you know the book is still a better tool for carrying around that information when you are actually there.
Yet, what I think is happening is that people are just dispensing with books completely. People look things up before they go.
They've worked out which hotel they're going to be staying in before they go out for a weekend. They have a few restaurants in their minds, and they know which clubs they are going to hit, which gallery they might go to. Whatever they are going to do is in their heads.
Frommer: Tony, despite the vast array of Internet information about travel, it has not cut into the sale of travel books, which are record-breaking at this moment.
Wheeler: I feel that it might eventually though, particularly in Europe where people have four or five or six weeks of holiday a year, and they're taking several trips.
People are now making five or six overseas trips a year, and they are not people really involved in travel like us. Just John Doe and John Smith, and that's a real trend.
Weissmann: What you just said is very damning of the future of your own business.
Wheeler: That's right. I find it worrying because I think it may be coming. I think we may be seeing a decline in the sales. And in addition to this real trend toward shorter trips, there is travel guilt developing, as well.
There's an article in the British media every day about, you know, stay home and don't travel or you're going to wreck the world.
Frommer: We have all been expecting the Internet to replace the travel guide, and yet it hasn't happened. The sale this year of travel guides all over the world is going to be historic in terms of the number, despite the existence of literally thousands of Web sites.
Zagat: It's not there yet, but change is happening faster than we've ever seen it. Someday you'll just wake up and there's going to be a hand-held that you can look at that has perfect clarity.
Wheeler: The killer app is satellite navigation. You can read about the restaurant and see that you are here, and it's 240 yards in that direction.
Zagat: We did that 10 years ago with NTT DoCoMo in Japan. We were the first foreign licensor to the Japanese telephone company.
The device knew exactly where you were. It told you where the nearest restaurants were in order of proximity, and that's especially important in Tokyo, where addresses don't mean anything.
It showed you how to go from where you were to the restaurant, it gave you the review of the restaurant and with a single click it connected you by phone with the restaurant. It can tell you if the restaurant is not taking any more reservations that night, so don't bother calling.
Weissmann: Tony, we talked earlier about the direction being toward niches, toward further stratification of the information. You got rather famously in trouble earlier this decade for expanding greatly into lots of different niches. Was that a question of timing, do you think? Were you doing it a little too soon?
Wheeler: I think there has to be a big enough market for it. Arthur mentioned handicapped books. People are constantly saying, "Why don't you get into this market?"
But it has to be a big enough niche to be worth doing, which is one of the advantages of doing things online, because you can do things that are much smaller.
Weissmann: Patricia, you just published your second book ["1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. and Canada Before You Die"], and I understand it had its second printing before even reaching bookstores. What have you discovered along the way that's likely to influence your future projects?
Schultz: People's idea of living is travel. It's not saying that they have a third car or a second home or that their kids went to great universities.
At the end of the day, what brings people so much inspiration and joy and excitement is to have traveled.