J. Clarke articles

The return of business travel has created an awkward question for companies that spent the past several years making ambitious climate promises. Meeting customers, visiting factories, attending conferences, and bringing distributed teams together can still produce real business value. Flying employees around the world, however, also produces emissions that increasingly show up in corporate climate accounting.

There was a time when booking a hotel felt relatively straightforward: pay for the room, then enjoy whatever came with it. Today, travelers increasingly encounter resort fees, destination fees, and individual surcharges for services that were once commonly complimentary or simply absorbed into the room rate. The practice varies enormously by property, but the modern hotel bill can turn surprisingly small conveniences into separate expenses.

For decades, corporate travel departments have managed one number above all others: money. Employees could fly to a conference, visit a client, or bring a remote team together as long as the trip fit the company’s financial rules and someone was willing to pay for it. Increasingly, companies are adding another number to the equation: the greenhouse gas emissions created by the journey.

For plenty of Americans, moving abroad has shifted from a daydream to something they are actively researching. Expatsi’s 2024 report drew responses from 116,363 Americans interested in leaving the country, with 54% hoping to relocate within six months to two years. Their preferred destinations range from nearby Canada and Mexico to Mediterranean favorites and some much farther-flung possibilities.

American food is much broader than burgers and apple pie. Travel across the country and you can encounter everything from cornmeal porridge to pork scraps molded into a breakfast loaf. Many visitors happily embrace these regional specialties, but international reaction roundups show that others find certain flavors, textures, and combinations genuinely baffling. These are the American foods that can turn an adventurous tourist's first bite into their last.