Have you ever left a vacation telling yourself, ‘that was one of the most amazing experiences in my life..’ If so, were the memories made by pure happenstance or predicted and expected going in? Was it selected only after extensive analysis of star ratings and reviews?  Was it full of meaningful touch points with certain locals, or one unexpected event that popped open a cold can of growth? What is it that makes a place feel authentic anyway? I asked the question to my partner, who like me, has had the privilege of traveling and living in multiple areas of the world.  Mind you, one thing I admire most about her is that she is someone blessed in appreciating pretty much all things that come in life. A true-to-life, go-with-the-flow person.  (And worthy of the hyphens.)  I knew her response would draw from a wide swath of stays- from luxury safari lodges to shoestring hostels.  So I paused to allow some time for her to reflect a bit.   Instead, the immediacy of her response surprised me.  She jumped right into a story about couchsurfing in Denmark, with a host who happened to be a chef. Elaborations flowed haphazardly from this to that about her whole experience- like tossing ingredients into a bowl.   For me, it was wonderful to listen to her stories and witness her expansive thought process unfold.  It came from the soul. The fact that her response had so effortlessly tapped her far-flung mental files, it made me realize that we all have similar experiences buried within the archives of our minds.  Sometimes they’re simple: a confounding moment looking up and discovering the bluest blue on an autumn day in the countryside, or driving a moped among a flowing river of other moped drivers through Saigon, or feeling suspended in time and space by the silence of sunset in the Sahara.  Nearly all of us possess an inner compulsion to share our travel memories.  Interestingly, when prompted, we're also eager to share them at the drop of a hat.  Just try it on someone.. This compulsion to share fond experiences has me curious… Whenever I start researching a trip abroad, I’ve come to realize that underlying my hotel searches is seeing its connection to the place.  Before going someplace new, I try my best on all the search engines, websites and online maps to filter out perhaps 99% of the listings.   I cross-reference maps to make sure it's proximity to major roads is either conveniently close or conveniently far.  Yet, each listing shows the same sequence of images: bed, bath and breakfasts.  Maybe a pair of champagne glasses.  A blissfully tranquil pool.  Swan towels.  You'd think the countless clock hours sacrificed to the booking.com and Airbnb gods should bring back some great finds karma, but the gods seem to never bring rain.  My partner (the one who wings it whenever she travels) witnesses my futile efforts and just smirks. (Don't worry, later, when she's calling me in a frantic travel jam, I get to- lovingly- smirk back.)  Both are worthy approaches, but there's got to be a happy medium out there!​​ A global stock of travel sameness is increasing anonymity. We’ve all heard how Airbnb’s origin story was based on a premise of expanding human connection.  While it's still their mission, it’s also evident how easily their platform profiteers are responding to the demand for no-contact stay experiences, or operating legions of listings as a full fledge business.  The truth is, the algorithms are doing exactly what they’re designed to do: optimize the common denominators among the widest pool of humanity possible for the greatest market share and therefore obtain the maximum possible profit.  As overtourism has become commonplace, we’ve warily come to accept how any locale with genuine authenticity now gets swarmed like a cloud of grasshoppers. A pestilence of tourists hungry for the next mass food source, leaving behind caskets of charm.  The Sundance Film Festival has outgrown quaint Park City. The expanded Marrakech airport welcomes ever more stag and hen parties thanks to EasyJet and RyanAir.  Residents of Barcelona protest city councils about their lost city. By supporting mass sameness, what are we generating for our world?   With Web3 and Ai becoming mainstays, I’m skeptical they’ll do much better.  As powerful as these tools become, they still won’t fully meet our unique human ability of discernment, and may just catapult us further from our human need to feel connection to place and to each other. Our degree of understanding each other is both the root cause and the antidote for human conflict. For those who do have the privilege to travel, we need to be clear about what we’re truly seeking when doing so.  We need to be making the quality of travel experiences more worthy of the carbon costs, worthy of the costs to cultural erosion, and worthy of the costs of our own human need to grow in understanding each other.  In essence, if our actions are helping to generate a lodging stock of sameness, how might we instead be generating a lodging stock of authenticity?