Armed with a degree in curiosity from the University of the World, Jacqui Gifford navigates the seas and skies of the globe safely, wisely and brilliantly — offering glimpses of it on a silver platter to the audience of Travel + Leisure multimedia platforms, whether it is the ink on paper or the pixels on a screen. 

Jacqui is quick to acknowledge that there is less than 5% duplication between her print audience and her digital audience, but she makes no excuses for that.

The travel market suffered a major blow during the COVID pandemic.  Jacqui, who had been editor-in-chief for only two years at the time, had to react and act swiftly to keep the brand afloat.  She told me, “Obviously, there’ve been pandemics before. In modern times to completely shut down the world as it was — for the travel business, it was heartbreaking.”

Quick to adapt to the necessary changes, Jacqui — “on the fly,” her words not mine — developed a plan and strategy to continue Travel + Leisure on all fronts.  And that strategy worked.

Ever the planner, she recalled, “Coming out of COVID, that formative time, I saw the desire for in person networking and interaction, and discussion was really at an all-time high.” That insight led to the idea with an idea of convening travel business leaders, which culminated in Travel + Leisure’s first World’s Best Summitt in 2024.  It was such a success that an encore one is planned for this coming July in NYC.

So, without further ado, here is my interview with Jacqui Gifford, editor-in-chief, Travel + Leisure:

But first the soundbites:

On the influence of being born overseas and moving to many countries due to her father’s job: “I think it really made me a more curious, empathetic person, because my parents really enjoyed learning about other cultures.”

On her strategy during COVID: “The game we could win was giving people inspiration and hope that there was something on the other side. So, we continued to do these beautiful travel stories. We used local reporters.”

On the biggest change in Travel + Leisure since she became editor: “I’d say letting the photography speak for itself.”

On whether they use AI or not in Travel + Leisure: “No, we do not. We have real people producing our content and that’s something that’s fundamental to who we are as a brand. We have people checking into the hotels. We have people flying the planes. We have people visiting, sailing on the cruise ships to create the content that matters to our audiences. So that is not something we’re doing.”

On her biggest competitor: “There’s a lot of great content out there and you’re competing for the eyeballs of all these people and you realize that they’re time poor these days, whether they’re busy at home, at work, they’re bombarded by content all day long.”

On her advice to deal with competition: “I think anybody who’s in this position at any brand must acknowledge that the competition isn’t just the traditional format. It’s, all sorts of things.”  

On the value of print in a digital age: “Well, the magazine to me, the magazine is healthy. It’s beautiful. It’s that classic lean back experience that allows you to see our covers in the back. Long form journalism is something we still do at Travel + Leisure. We’re incredibly proud of it.”

On the second World’s Best Summit: “This year, we have a full new round of topics to discuss whether it’s expedition travel, solo travel, all inclusive, like the rise of and reinvention of all inclusive, the loyalty landscape and where that’s shifting and going. So those are just a few of many topics, but I think it’s going to be great.”

On her biggest challenge: “I would say this. I think that the biggest challenge that anybody has today, if you’re a journalist, if you’re an editor in chief, is, is prioritization.”

On how she unwinds at the end of the day: “If I’m going to unwind, I probably take a bath.”

On what keeps her up at night: “The main thing will always be my son. I’m always worried about him. But he’s a great kid.”

On her favorite country: “I’m going to say as of right now, and I’m biased a little bit, because I was born there. Japan…”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Jacqui Gifford, editor-in-chief, Travel + Leisure:

Samir Husni: My first question to you, you have a marvelous background, born in Japan, headed to Saudi Arabia, then Qatar, then Bahrain, and then back to Philadelphia.

Jacqui Gifford: Yeah.

Samir Husni: Does this background help you as an editor-in-chief of Travel + Leisure?

Jacqui Gifford: 100 percent. There’s not even a question. I was so fortunate. My father’s work took us to all the countries you just named.

And when we were living in the Middle East, and when we were living in Japan, my mom and dad prioritized seeing all the countries that were in the region.  So, when we lived in Japan, we went to Hong Kong. I did mainland China when I was 13 years old. We went to Malaysia, the Philippines.

When we lived in the Middle East. We did Egypt. We did Dubai.

We were really, I don’t want to say ahead of the curve, but in some ways, I think when I lived in Doha, there were three hotels in the whole destination. And now every single luxury brand is there. The airport is state of the art.

I was just writing about this in my current editor’s letter. We used to deplane on the tarmac. Basically, the old airport, there were six gates. It’s amazing to see the transformation of that part of the world, but also just in general, how much more intrepid travelers are these days.

We would go to places. I think it really made me a more curious, empathetic person, because my parents really enjoyed learning about other cultures.

Samir Husni: So, can we say you have a degree in curiosity?

Jacqui Gifford: I love that.

I got my BA, not at Princeton, but a BA in global curiosity from University of the World. Yes, you’re right.

Samir Husni: You started working at Travel + Leisure in 2013, but you became editor-in-chief in 2018. Then two years later, the world changed. How did you cope?

Jacqui Gifford: That was one, without a doubt, the most difficult thing I’ve ever lived through as on a human level, just personally, and then certainly in business, it was unprecedented for the travel industry. The travel industry has been through ups and downs. We had 9-11 impact global travel, also in New York where I moved here right after that. And people were hesitant to travel, for sure.

There’s always been sort of dips after the financial crisis, people pulled back a little bit, but COVID-19 was unprecedented. Obviously, there’ve been pandemics before. In modern times to completely shut down the world as it was, for the travel business, it was heartbreaking.

I saw people must let go of employees. They didn’t know which way their business was going to go. And at Travel + Leisure, what we did, we moved to work remotely, and we still produce the magazine.

We never stopped, never stopped producing content for the website or social media. We adjusted our tone, and we were looking and monitoring the news. But I think the strategy that I developed, and in all honesty, I developed it on the fly because, again, no one had ever lived through this before.

I knew that people would travel again. And we were never going to fully, as journalists, travel journalists, understand the nature of the disease and how fast and where it was going to go. That was a game we weren’t going to win.

The game we could win was giving people inspiration and hope that there was something on the other side. So, we continued to do these beautiful travel stories. We used local reporters.

We got people out in the field safely. There were plenty of stories when we would be sending a photographer and then wait, nope, we couldn’t do it. There were stops and starts, but most of the time, we kept things running.

I think that was the right approach because now we’ve seen it play out that travel is now so ingrained and fundamental in people’s lives. They just don’t want to give it up.

Samir Husni: If you are to pinpoint one major change that you did with the magazine since you became editor-in-chief, what will that change be?

Jacqui Gifford: I would say the biggest change is, I know that, here I have our latest issue. I can hold it up for you. It’s a beautiful picture. I’d say letting the photography speak for itself.

You know, a lot of the old magazine-making covers, cover lines were designed for a newsstand where people would go and physically walk past a newsstand and this line would catch their eye, right? And so, if you look at magazines, even from like five or six years ago, a lot of them were still doing that and having, the line at the top. There’s an art to it. I appreciate that art, but that art is frankly dying as newsstands die.

They’re still important, but it’s not as big of a part of our business. Travel + Leisure never was really a newsstand brand anyway.  I think one of the biggest changes is just not feeling like so tied to old ways of doing things.

I was like we’re going to let the imagery speak for itself. We don’t need to clutter it up and make it into something that a person at an airport is going to just like grab their attention, let them be grabbed by the picture and less about the words.

Samir Husni:  And talking about pictures, we must mention AI.

Do you use AI in any of your photography or content?

Jacqui Gifford: No, we do not. We have real people producing our content and that’s something that’s fundamental to who we are as a brand. We have people checking into the hotels.

We have people flying the planes. We have people visiting, sailing on the cruise ships to create the content that matters to our audiences. So that is not something we’re doing.

Samir Husni: Excellent. There are quite a few new travel magazines that were born in the last two or three years, Travel. They are very specialized with high cover prices and low frequencies. Do you consider this competition?

Jacqui Gifford: Sure.  I consider them competition, but you must remember Travel +Leisure isthe world’s largest travel media brand, across print, digital, social. But in this period of media and history,  if we were to look back, the media ecosystem, there’s a lot of great content out there and you’re competing for the eyeballs of all these people and you realize that they’re  time poor these days, whether they’re busy at home, at work, they’re bombarded by content all day long.

Their friends’ content on Instagram, obviously we’re on Instagram bombarding them with content too, in a good way. So, I consider, I don’t consider just niche magazines, travel magazines, competitors. They are so many other things, like Netflix is a competitor of ours to a certain degree because people want to watch travel shows and food shows and that’s something that we cover.

So, I think anybody who’s in this position at any brand must acknowledge that the competition isn’t just the traditional format. It’s, all sorts of things. That’s the hardest part of this job and any, job in media is that there’s just more and more stuff to consume and you need to cut; you must be good at what you do to cut through the clutter. Everybody’s time poor.

We cannot add another hour to our day, and even we did add that extra hour, there’s other stuff that people want to do.

I have a young son, sitting in and reading books at home to him or other things. There was a way of life that I remember very, quite distinctly when, before the internet, before this, the way that the pace of life was, it was a little bit slower. You grew up watching TV, you had in Philadelphia, where I lived for a little bit, you had three, six, and 10, the major channels and networks and Fox eventually came in there, but that was your options. Now, I don’t even know how many options there are. I think people are paralyzed by choice sometimes.

Samir Husni: As you investigate your experience as a travel writer, as an editor, what do you enjoy most, the service journalism aspect or the aspirational aspects? The do something writing or the sit back relax and enjoy writing?

Jacqui Gifford:  That’s a great question. I love it all.

That’s part of my problem is that I probably try to do too much, but I’ll give you two good examples. So I’m on TikTok, I just posted of something yesterday about traveling with my parents who are older, and what you can do to help, to navigate that process when you’re traveling with someone who’s older, check your bags, don’t do carry on, research where your gate is,  research where the bathroom is, the restaurants, all sorts of stuff, because as they’ve gotten older, and they were professional travelers back in the day, it’s gotten more challenging. That’s service journalism, me talking right to my fans and followers.

I love doing stuff like that. The flip side, I also like checking into a hotel and writing a little bit of a longer piece about something that’s not quite so straightforward. I did a story for us that won an award which was exciting about a cruise that we did to the way it sparked curiosity, to your point earlier about nature and wildlife in my then seven-year-old son.

That just took more time to produce. There’s value in both things.

Samir Husni:  Before we talk about the World’s Best Summit that is coming up in July, let me ask you if your journey at Travel + Leisure has been a walk in a rose garden?

Jacqui Gifford: No, no, it’s never a walk in a rose garden. I mean, well, COVID being a big challenge for travel, and you know, and this is true, science proves me right. You are trained to forget trauma. Your brain wants you to forget something that’s traumatic.

COVID was incredibly traumatic for the globe. I purposely tried to remind the travel industry how dark that period was, because I don’t want us to forget. And I don’t want to forget how hard it was for me as a manager, but I did it.

Some of my most creative work came out of that time. But again, nobody wants to talk about it because our brains, it’s too hard to think about. But, no, it’s not been a walk in a rose garden.

But look it’s like any job. There are some days when you feel like things are going your way. And then there are some days that, no matter what you do, you just feel like you can’t get the right foot forward.

I feel very confident in team we have at Travel + Leisure, which is why we launched the summit, and which we’re very proud of and going into year two, it’s going to be fantastic.

Samir Husni:  Before I ask you about the summit, what do you believe in 2025, is the role of the printed Travel + Leisure in this digital age?

Jacqui Gifford: Well, the magazine to me, the magazine is healthy. It’s beautiful.

It’s that classic lean back experience that allows you to see our covers in the back. Long form journalism is something we still do at Travel + Leisure. We’re incredibly proud of it.

We invest in sending photographers and writers out into the field to tell the more immersive stories that people want to pick it up a magazine and sit back and have some time to themselves. I do that with other magazines when I’m at home. I also think there’s something aspirational if you have a beautiful magazine in your house to have it on your coffee table.

There’s a timeless quality to it. I’ve noticed this with some of our magazines; you could pick up last year’s July issue of  Travel + Leisure and find plenty of articles. Most of them, no, you know what I’m going to say, all of them are still relevant because they’re there, the writing is sharp, the execution is good.

You’re not being fed that content by an algorithm. Right? It’s there’s a sense of discovery. And I find that when I read anything in print, usually I find something that I wasn’t, I didn’t know I was looking for.

And that’s the beauty of why people still read magazines is that they can get a great idea. And they’re not just typing and searching; the intent isn’t there yet. And then they, they find something, and they go, oh, I never thought about that.

Maybe I’ll take that trip in another, in another year, and six months, whatever. So that’s the value of print. And you must have across all the different channels; you have to have a strategy that speaks to that audience.

There’s a 5% duplication rate between the digital audience of Travel + Leisure and the print audience. We’re talking to two different people. And that’s okay. Maybe we don’t need to worry so much about how you grow the pie; you don’t have to hit people at every single medium; it’s okay, if someone who’s on TikTok and loves Travel +Leisure isn’t reading the magazine, I’d love for them to, and maybe they will someday. But if they’re not doing it right the second, that’s fine.

Samir Husni: Through the grapevine, I heard that you have a favorite cover of Travel + Leisure, can you tell me which one and why?

Jacqui Gifford: You heard from the grapevine, my favorite cover? Oh, wow. I don’t know. I don’t want to give you wrong answer. From this year? Or was it just in general?

Samir Husni: In general.

Jacqui Gifford: Favorite cover? I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I mean, this year, I loved the cover we did of Gabon, of two gorillas.

It was a mother gorilla holding a baby gorilla. I thought that was breathtaking. Because the gorillas faces and the way she was looking at the baby and the baby was looking at her and holding its arm around her.

I know our readers like wildlife, and I enjoy that. It’s one of the things that moves me when I travel. And when I saw that picture, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is evolution.

Samir Husni: Thank you. Moving to the Second World’s Best Summit that you intend to host in NYC this coming July, what can you tell me about it?

Jacqui Gifford: The summit is interesting. I will say it’s mostly B2B.

It’s not necessarily, we do have reader interaction, which I’ll get to at the Food and Wine Classic in Charleston, which Travel +Leisure is a part of. I know because I interacted with our readers there, because they would see the advertisements in the magazine, on social media, and they bought tickets. And I hosted a crabbing tour, which was awesome.

The World’s Best Summit is something I’ve thought about doing for some time. But we finally pulled the trigger as it were to do it last year, because I think coming out of COVID, that formative time, I saw the desire for in person networking and interaction, and discussion was really at an all-time high. Travel + Leisure participates in so many conferences, so many events.

I’ve been to enough of them to know what’s a good one.  I felt like we could do a really good job of showing our expertise, our authority, our trust with our own in-house editors, moderating and curating discussion. It’s not huge, it’s 350 people, which is but we want. the right 350 people, we want people to come and to really participate and learn.

We launched it last year. And it was a lot of work, but it was fun. I have a very healthy respect for people who do events.

It’s very time consuming, but it was a runaway success, people really enjoyed it. And so, we have our World’s Best Awards around the time of the summit. It’s kind of just a big celebratory moment for Travel + Leisure in general.

I think what’s great about it is that there’s a lot of conferences out there that do a great job of talking about the industry, but I think from an editorial lens and sort of weaving consumer trends with business knowledge, thinking about it from the readers perspective. That’s where we’re coming from. And nobody really was doing that.

They’re doing it perhaps with other topics and other brands. But that’s what we did. And it’s great.

Samir Husni:  How is this year’s Summit going to be different?

Jacqui Gifford: This year, we have a full new round of topics to discuss whether it’s expedition travel, solo travel, all inclusive, like the rise of and reinvention of all inclusive, the loyalty landscape and where that’s shifting and going. So those are just a few of many topics, but I think it’s going to be great. We’re very excited.

Samir Husni: Are you adding to your title Event in Chief.

Jacqui Gifford: Yeah, exactly.

But you know what, the thing about an in-person event, it’s draining, it’s that adrenaline rush that gets you through but once you’re done, and you look back at what we accomplished and all the people we met and talked with; I think it was inspiring.  I see for the future of Travel + Leisure, whether it’s the Summit, or the Classic in Charleston, or as yet unnamed event, I think going and meeting people where they are is important.

Samir Husni: And do you think this is to help solidify the brand?

Jacqui Gifford: For sure.

There’s no question. If you’re not talking about yourself and all that you’re doing, and this is something our CEO Neil Vogel is so great about, and really, you must be getting out there and telling your brand story if you’re not doing it. You have to be relentless about explaining the mission, talking to the audience, and you can repeat yourself, that’s fine.

This is what I was talking about earlier with the fracturing of people’s time and attention. There are people that don’t know yet that we’re doing this Summit. And that’s okay, but we’ve got to keep telling people about it. We’ve got to continue to message how important it is and why people need to be there.

Samir Husni:  Before I ask you my two final typical questions, is there any question I failed to ask you I should ask you?

Jacqui Gifford: Oh, my gosh. I don’t think so.

You know what, I would say this. I think that the biggest challenge that anybody has today, if you’re a journalist, if you’re an editor in chief, is, is prioritization. You know, that’s to me is the hardest part of this job, you kind of asked about it a little bit earlier.

I’ve sort of always lived by the mantra that more is more is more. And that sort of mentality is what keeps Travel + Leisure going.

The people who work here, they’re just naturally curious people. But still, we need to be focused on the right things all the time. And if something’s not working, it’s okay to say goodbye to that thing if it’s not working.

Sami Husni: And if I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch Jacqui doing to unwind?

Jacqui Gifford: Well, I’m an intense person. So, it’s very hard for me to unwind. But you’re going to like this answer.

I am militant about taking a bath. I take baths all the time. I don’t really like showers.

If I’m going to unwind, I probably take a bath.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Jacqui Gifford: There are lots of things that keep me up at night.

But the main thing will always be my son. I’m always worried about him. But he’s a great kid.

It’s not one specific thing. It’s just, when you’re a mom, you want the best for your kid. And that’s it.

The other thing too, I like to if I’m up, which I am, sometimes 2 am to 4 am, you can always text me. I use that time to read. And I know it’s not necessarily the best thing.

But I find I’ll often just go into my living room and sit and look out at the skyline and read. And that’s another form of my meditation on living in New York City. Gosh, like, isn’t this cool? I don’t want to fight being awake sometimes.

I just look out at the skyline and appreciate it.

Samir Husni: And one final question, best country or city you’ve been to?

Jacqui Gifford: Okay. This is a very difficult question.

I’m sure I get a version of this all the time. I’m going to say as of right now, and I’m biased a little bit, because I was born there. But Japan, having just been and come back from Tokyo, I grew up there, I think it’s, it’s got to be up there for all the reasons that, you know, culture, food, art, fashion.

I love Tokyo Disneyland. There’re so many great things about it. And I feel similar vibes when I’m up in Tokyo, because usually I’m jet lagged.

I like to just look out at the skyscrapers and the lights, and I leave my blinds up just because I don’t like feeling sort of entombed in a soulless hotel room somewhere. I think Tokyo is really a great place.

Samir Husni: Excellent.  Thank you.