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Some things deserve to die. Not people. Formats. This summer took five of them, and you won’t miss a single one once you notice it’s gone. Full disclosure before we lower the caskets: World Travel Magazine has, on occasion, helped keep one or two of these alive. We repent. We proceed.
Bow your heads. Or don’t. The deceased never earned the reverence.
1. The Infinity-Pool Photograph. The most common image on earth cannot prove you’ve gone anywhere rare. Right now a phone is rising above a waterline, tilting the horizon so the pool appears to bleed into the sea. Forty thousand of them post tonight. The pool in Bali looks like the pool in Santorini looks like the pool behind a villa in Dubai. The frame promises exclusivity and delivers a stock photo. It says: I arrived. It means: I arrived where everyone arrives. The picture that once signalled taste now signals only access to a booking engine.
Swim at six in the morning, when the water is cold and the terrace is yours alone, and keep the picture for yourself. The private swim is the new flex. Nobody sees it. That’s the point.
2. The Fourteen-Course Tasting Menu. Dinner is not a triathlon. Course seven lands and you’ve stopped tasting; now you’re enduring, checking the clock between the foam and the ash. The kitchen mistook length for ambition. Three and a half hours at the table, a tweezered procession of single bites, each set down and explained like a verdict at The Hague. Solemnity killed the fun, and the fun was the entire reason to eat out.
The best kitchens noticed first. The à la carte is back. Order the three dishes the chef is genuinely proud of, drink past what the pairing permits, and leave while you still want to keep talking. A great meal should end with an appetite for the next one, not a debrief.
3. The “Hidden Gem”. The phrase is a press release for a place about to be ruined. The moment a beach, a backstreet trattoria, or a four-room guesthouse gets called one in print, the clock starts: the queue, the surge pricing, the second branch in an airport departure hall. “Hidden gem” is what we write when we want credit for the discovery and none of the blame for the crowd that follows. World Travel Magazine has set those two words in type. We won’t again.
Say the name plainly, or keep the secret completely. Tell your six closest friends the truth over dinner and let the place stay the size it is. The honest recommendation, quietly given, is the only kind that doesn’t devour what it loves.
4. The Champagne Sabrage. A sabre is not a bottle opener. The blade appears, the phones go up, the neck flies off, and a room applauds a party trick in its fourth decade of reruns. It sacrifices an ounce of good wine and a minute of everyone’s evening to theatre that surprises no one over the age of eleven. Arrival should never require a stunt to announce itself.
Let the person who understands the bottle open it in silence, thumbs easing the cork until it sighs instead of bangs. The quiet pour is the costlier gesture, because it trusts the wine to be the event all by itself. Real confidence doesn’t reach for a sword.
5. The Digital-Detox Retreat. You cannot photograph your guests not using their phones and call it a detox. Someone took that shot. Someone posted it, tagged the property, and scheduled it for peak engagement on a Tuesday. The retreat that confiscates your devices at reception and then broadcasts your serenity has sold you a contradiction and charged a premium for the privilege. Peace is not a content calendar.
Switch the phone off yourself, in an ordinary room, and tell absolutely no one you did it. The unbroadcast silence costs nothing and works on contact. Real absence leaves no trace behind — that is precisely how you’ll know it was real.
That’s five. The obituaries are short because the lives were.
Grief moves fast on this page. Every dead cliché clears the room for something with a pulse.
The infinity pool is gone. The horizon stayed — and it was always the better view. ◼
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© This article was first published in Aug-Sept-Oct 2026 edition of World Travel Magazine.
