Here’s why we’re starting to publish new flight and hotel reviews again

As you may have noticed, we have not published any new flight or hotel reviews on our site for some time now.

During the COVID-19 crisis, our team has temporarily ceased taking review trips, and as more and more nations and U.S. states entered lockdowns we also decided to halt the pipeline of new reviews ready for publication. Providing reviews is one of our core missions, and we know our readers look to us for unbiased coverage of the experiences they will encounter on their travels — but with almost the entire world staying at home, it was time to pause. Instead, we published a selection of our most popular reviews from the past year.

Yet, we are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. While travel remains something that only emergency personnel should do right now, our team has begun booking trips for later this year, knowing that airlines are waiving change and cancellation fees. And for trips that require lots of planning, now might be the right time to start exploring your options.

So, beginning Monday, April 20, we will resume publishing new flight, hotel and lounge reviews from trips taken before the lockdown. We hope this will help you choose once we’re all ready to start booking trips again.

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Hotel reviews editor Nick Ellis and I will bring you at least three reviews per week from our team in the New York and London offices and our globe-trotting reporters and editors. Since we will all travel closer to home in the near future, we will publish more reviews related to domestic U.S. trips, a shift we had decided even prior to the coronavirus outbreak.

You can expect to read about what it’s like to fly low-fare airlines like Spirit and Frontier, or to cross the continent from coast to coast in premium cabins like United’s Polaris on the Boeing 787. If you are planning longer-range trips, we will take you aboard the only long-haul first class on a U.S. airline, American’s Flagship First, and tell you all about the experience in trans-Atlantic economy on airlines including Air France and KLM. Those looking for hotel reviews can expect our unvarnished look at places ranging from the W South Beach in Florida to the Four Seasons Nam Hai in Vietnam.

So, even if all the travel we are doing these days is on a screen, from our homes, we look forward to taking you with us on our review trips — and to the day when we can take to the skies again.

Featured image: United Polaris, by Zach Griff/The Points Guy