Travel agents are in demand—especially for luxury trips AI can try, but humans still have the edge when it comes to booking holidays Aug 13th 2026 NOT MUCH can faze Olivia Ferney. The Canadian travel “fixer” is at the whim of her wealthy clients: each one spends at least $1m on travel every year, on top of a $100,000 subscription fee to her firm, Top Tier Travel. The requests are lavish (fly to Paris to fetch a croissant) or ludicrous (“call whoever you need to call” to get it to stop raining). The escapades delight her roughly 2m fans on social media and are even being adapted into a tv show. Travel agents often go above and beyond for their clients. That is in part why people still use them in an age of AI-tineraries. In Britain about a third
of travellers booked their holidays through a human specialist last year, reckons ABTA, a British trade association. Across the pond more than 310,000 agents are members of the American Society of Travel Advisers, another trade group, up from 190,000 in 2024. LinkedIn recently ranked the job one of the fastest-growing in America (though the Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons it will grow more slowly than average in the period until 2034). People turn to travel advisers for their “taste and judgment” in curating trips, says Evan Frank, co-founder of Fora, a luxury host agency. Seasoned advisers have superior knowledge of particular countries and a network of exclusive hotels. Some stick to a particular niche, booking trips for people who have food allergies or tourists who want to travel solo or with their pets. Travel agents also provide an extra layer of support that many find reassuring. You can’t call your AI if your room is wrong or you missed your transfer, observes Mr Frank. But a human adviser is there for any conundrum you might face (or croissant you might fancy). People are more likely to book with travel agents during geopolitical ructions or periods of extreme weather, when it feels riskier to make bookings. Advisers may be snarky about AI’s shortcomings, but many use it in their work. Some agencies treat AI as a “member of the team”, notes Mark Tanzer, boss of ABTA, getting bots to do the jobs humans find boring. Fora built a billion-dollar business by providing advisers with an AI platform that speeds up administrative tasks. As bots get better at planning trips, people may rely less on human advisers. But top-end services will probably endure. Ms Ferney’s clients enjoy being able to reach her come rain or shine. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/13/travel-agents-are-in-demand- especially-for-luxury-trips
A prizewinning novel explores the legacy of the Rwandan genocide Gaël Faye’s “Jacaranda” looks at the limits of reconciliation Aug 13th 2026 IT WAS THE kind of debut every aspiring novelist dreams of. When Gaël Faye, a hip-hop musician turned writer, published “Petit Pays” (“Small Country”) in 2016, it gathered immediate acclaim. The novel—inspired by his experience of the Burundian civil war as a teenager—sold 1.5m copies, was adapted into a film and is now taught in French schools. It was a tough act to follow. But “Jacaranda”, released in France in 2024, sold nearly 100,000 copies in its first month and won the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. This time Mr Faye—whose father is French and whose mother is Rwandan—draws on his memories of visiting his mother’s homeland as a child. His spare, lucid prose, now
translated into English, explores the aftermath of the genocide of 1994, when perhaps 500,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsi, were killed over the course of three months. The story is told from the perspective of Milan, a French-Rwandan boy living in Versailles. News of the genocide reaches him first through the tv, then through Claude, a young relative who has been attacked with a machete and brought to France for medical treatment. It is not until years later that Milan has the opportunity to visit Rwanda, where he reunites with Claude and meets Eusébie, an old friend of his mother’s. Rwanda’s authoritarian government requires citizens to follow a policy of reconciliation. Not everyone feels it. Survivors live next to the people who killed their family and friends. Milan observes the efforts of the gacaca courts, community-based tribunals which tried over 1m people accused of genocide-related crimes between 2002 and 2012. He accompanies Claude as he testifies against two genocidaires. The trial brings some justice, but little closure. Years later, during kwibuka, the annual period of remembrance, Milan watches Eusébie give her testimony. As she talks, people in the crowd collapse, scream out or deliriously beg for their lives from phantom killers. The trauma has reverberated down the generations, Milan observes, for many of the distressed were too young to have been born when the killing began. “Jacaranda” is a nuanced exploration of conflict and the meaning of resolution. Though it is focused on Rwanda—where the author has lived for many years—the question of whether people can forgive and forget past wrongs is a universal one. Hope lies with the next generation. One scene describes a killer’s sons quietly rebuilding a house their father helped destroy.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/13/a-prizewinning-novel-explores-the- legacy-of-the-rwandan-genocide
How the world was wired The transatlantic telegraph cable helped usher in the information age, a new book shows Aug 13th 2026 IT HAS BEEN called the Victorian equivalent of the Apollo project. At the time it was compared to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, was said to have half undone the Declaration of Independence, and prompted giddy predictions of world peace. The completion of the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 showed that a global telecommunications network was possible and marked the dawn of the modern information age. This epic tale was retold in the early years of the internet boom, and today a growing awareness of humanity’s reliance on vulnerable but unseen submarine data cables has given it renewed relevance. A triumph of
Victorian engineering, the Atlantic cable marked the point at which the age of steel and steam began to yield to the modern world in which industrial might depends on the transport and manipulation of weightless data. In his pacey retelling of the story, an adventure yarn with telegraph cables, James Tabor shows how the technology of one era laid the foundations for the next. Cyrus Field, an American businessman who was the driving force behind the project, embodied this pivot. He had retired in 1853 at the age of 34 after making a fortune selling paper, demand for which had exploded in America with the rise of mass-market penny newspapers. But a new way of distributing information was emerging at the time: telegraphy. Looking for a new project, Field got involved in a scheme to build a telegraph line across the Cabot Strait to Newfoundland. This would speed up the delivery of news across the Atlantic by a couple of days, because messages could be sent part of the way by wire. But looking at his globe one day, Field thought to himself: why not just run a cable all the way across the Atlantic? Submarine telegraphy was then in its infancy, with a handful of subsea cables linking Britain to France, and connecting various points in the Mediterranean. Nobody had tried to lay a cable in the deep water of the Atlantic. But Field swiftly won the endorsements of both Matthew Maury, the founder of modern oceanography, and Samuel Morse, pioneer of the electric telegraph, and began raising money for his venture. After much lobbying he gained official backing from the American and British governments. On the British side, a crucial role was played by the financial secretary to the British Treasury, who offered financial support and the use of British navy ships. The official in question was James Wilson, founder of The Economist—so in a sense this newspaper is a sibling of the Atlantic cable.
Amid a large cast of colourful characters, the villain of the piece is Edward “Wildman” Whitehouse, the original chief electrician of the project, who proved to be woefully unqualified for the role, and whose insistence that long-distance telegraphy was simply a matter of turning up the voltage had dire consequences. Mr Tabor’s story ranges widely, from the decks of cable- laying ships beset by storms, to shenanigans in corporate boardrooms, to the opulent mansions and hotels of 19th-century New York. Compared with previous accounts, the focus of “Lightning Beneath the Sea” is on human drama and derring-do, rather than electrical theory or corporate finance. Mr Tabor charts the triumphs and disasters of the cable project in exhaustive yet thrilling detail, as almost everything that can possibly go wrong does, and Field and his team are forced to push electrical, nautical and financial limits. Despite the project’s vast scale, its workings are easy to grasp, since it boils down to spooling long wires out of the back of ships. A running theme is whether wiring up the world with submarine cables could help promote peace, which was one of Field’s original motivations. The celebratory messages sent between Queen Victoria and two American presidents, at various points in the tale, also expressed such hopes, as did many newspapers. Such hopes were of course dashed. In the modern era the notion that greater connectivity would promote peace has been espoused by
Mark Zuckerberg, with equal lack of success. Lack of rapid communication is not the chief cause of conflict, as should be apparent to anyone who uses the internet. The cable’s story also serves as a parable in another way. As the project progresses, the apparently impossible gradually starts to look feasible, and outlandish feats (such as recovering broken cables from the ocean floor) start to become routine, as new techniques and machinery are steadily refined. It is a reminder of the power of perseverance and innovation, and may bring to mind, for modern readers, such challenges as building fusion reactors, quantum computers or reusable rockets. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke, a science-fiction author who published his own account of the Atlantic cable in the 1950s and would later liken it to the Apollo programme, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/12/how-the-world-was-wired