Daybreak Holiday: DEI, Antitrust, Summer Vacations
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Thank you so much for joining us on this special edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. U.S. markets are closed for the Juneteenth holiday. I'm Nathan Hager. Coming up this hour, we'll update you on the latest antitrust battles facing big tech. We'll speak with Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Litigation Analyst Jennifer Reed. And if you're looking for a travel deal this summer, we'll look at some under-the-radar trip ideas with Nikki Eckstein and Chris Rauser of Bloomberg Pursuits. But first, let's get started.

But first, one of the big goals of the Trump administration during the first six months of its second term has been to change diversity, equity and inclusion programs, not just in government, but in business and at universities across the country.

For an update, we bring in Simone Foxman, who covers race, equity, gender, and class for Bloomberg News. And Simone, really appreciate you coming on with us on this holiday edition because it really seemed like a good time to do this. Not only are we a few years out, you know, from the

racial reckoning that really seemed to kickstart DEI and arguably this official Juneteenth holiday. Now, it seems like we're in a much different moment in corporate America. Don't you agree? Absolutely. I mean, we've really seen...

a whipsaw in public opinion, in internal corporate opinion, in exactly the way that they kind of address issues of race, gender, gender identity, and beyond. And, you know, a lot of that has been spearheaded by the Trump administration, but not all. And we can talk about, you know, what companies were doing already.

Yeah, let's do that because it would be important to just get an idea of what companies were doing even before these executive orders aimed at dialing DEI back were taking place. What was the trajectory for DEI?

Yeah, let's rewind even a little bit further than that. I mean, diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are essentially the product of diversity policies that were spearheaded in the 1980s. So you've seen a lot of the programs, whether for small businesses, whether internally at companies, be around for a really long time. Part of this was actually set off

by a kind of conservative, uh, think tank that had talked about how so much of the new population of younger workers would be, um, diverse, you know, not white men, frankly. Uh, and, uh,

And it really convinced executives that you needed to kind of plan for workforces that were more diverse. So DEI policies, or what ultimately fell under that moniker, have been around a long time. Obviously, they were really ramped up after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

And the language that corporate executives used around that time was, frankly, quite charged. You had Uber talking about trying to be an anti-racist company. You had employers really promising large transformative steps to change the makeup of their workforce.

including things that look like trying to increase the number of, say, black managers or women of a certain, executives of a certain level by, you know, 50% in the next three years, really putting kind of

specific numbers on things in a way that they hadn't done before. What really kind of marked, I mean, there was obviously kind of, you know, pushback to some of this almost immediately. We saw Trump late in his first term try and pass an executive order against or try and institute an executive order against, you know, unconscious bias trainings that ultimately went nowhere.

But what really kind of fomented this reversal, especially within companies, was the Students for Fair Admissions decision around Harvard and affirmative action. And it forced a lot of companies, even though they weren't the subject of that, to look again at their internal policies and make sure that they weren't going to be in the way overall.

of what Trump's executive orders were doing. So that kind of brings us up to where we were maybe last year. And then we can talk about kind of what's changed this year. Yeah. So let's talk about that. I mean, are these benchmarks still in effect now that we have executive orders that are, you know, targeting DEI in the federal government? Certainly. But, you know, by virtue of that on corporate America as well, particularly a lot of these companies that do business with the federal government.

Yeah. Corporate America was already looking at some of its policies and trying to make sure that the legal rationale that, you know, led to the Students for Fair Admission decision that overturned affirmative action wouldn't be applied to them in ways that were damaging. So we saw a lot of, you know, employee resource groups, for example, make sure that they were open to everyone, scholarships.

You know, kind of welcome everyone, you know, even though they were intended, for example, to raise black students into, you know, engineering or something like that. Now they had to be open, at least to all races.

What you've seen since January 20th is frankly another reassessment, because what Trump's executive orders have said is not just that they want to eliminate what they call illegal DEI within the federal government, but they're also really encouraging federal contractors to.

to eliminate, and private companies beyond federal contractors, to eliminate DEI. Now, the problem for companies is they don't do a great job of defining exactly what that means and what is different this time around. We've had some inklings here and there already.

largely this falls along the things that the companies already thought kind of fell into these gray areas, those targets I mentioned earlier. Some lawyers see them as too close to quotas, which are already illegal. You're not supposed to be able to hire anyone on the basis of protected characteristics like race or gender. So you've seen companies kind of

even that were the more aspirational goals with less firm targets, they've kind of rolled some of them back just to kind of avoid things. But frankly, the corporate world has been very scared. Not only that the government is going to come after

them, but also that they may end up on some list somewhere of companies that are woke, that follow this illegal DEI, and therefore that that's going to prompt consternation among their consumers and ultimately affect their business. We're speaking with Bloomberg News reporter Simone Foxman, who covers equality for Bloomberg News. You mentioned illegal DEI as a phrase.

in these executive orders. Is there a question in the corporate world about what illegal DEI actually means? Has that been defined clearly? No, and that's really the issue for them. You know, certain things, again, as I mentioned, you're not supposed to be able to hire people without

a view towards their race or gender identity and beyond. The critics of DEI will say that that is essentially what was happening over the last couple of years, whether explicit or not. But many companies say, you know, a lot of these programs that we had that fell under this DEI moniker, whatever they fall under now, you know, were not

saying we should hire someone because of their race, but that we should do a better job of expanding the pot, recruiting, drawing from communities that we haven't necessarily seen a lot of representation from, and assessing our internal policies to make sure that we are inclusive of everybody.

So a lot of, you know, whether it's sort of trainings about inclusivity, whether it's things like scholarship programs, whether it's turning up at large recruiting events,

that especially draw out people from underrepresented communities. There's a lot of those things that still, frankly, exist within companies that companies have decided, well, this is important enough to us that it's important for us to maintain these programs.

um we don't think they violate the law uh we think that you know whatever the administration is saying you know this is not illegal um and it's important to us and therefore we're going to continue to do them and i frankly found in my reporting that this is true even at companies that said publicly that they were dialing back on dei to some extent you know whether that's

or any number of companies really across the board that kind of made these enormous announcements that were

treated with great fanfare are, frankly, still talking about things. For example, Walmart, until my story came out in mid-May, had diversity, equity, and inclusion and the importance of it on its job postings. So not all of this has, frankly, gone away. Well, Walmart certainly is one of the highest profile companies in the world. And if companies like that are keeping some of these programs on the books, how are they sort of striking that balance?

when you said earlier that a lot of these companies don't want to be on the administration's radar. They want to keep a lot of this stuff on the down low. So they've gone and tweaked programs. Anything that was in a legal gray area, that potentially looked a little bit too much like quotas, they've kind of pulled back. Anything that didn't welcome everyone, they've pulled back. Anything that's very political, they kind of pulled back.

But, you know, the Walmart example is telling. Even though they made a change in their supplier diversity program, now called supplier inclusion program, so the branding is part of this here, they still have landing pages on the company website saying,

about LGBTQIA plus founded brands, about Hispanic black women owned brands, you know, really a nod to the fact that consumers, some consumers are interested in seeing who's behind the brands. You know, Lowe's, despite making an announcement and talking about how it was rolling back elements of its program, really sought to reassure investors that these changes were not sweeping.

So you've seen really little tweaks around the edges. And Littler Mendelsohn is a law firm that kind of asks corporate executives about their opinions. In a survey they conducted in late February to mid-March, they asked corporate executives, I think it was over 300, to what extent is your organization considering new or further rollbacks of your inclusion, equity, and diversity programs for

45% said not at all. 32% said to a small extent. So 77% here not making any major changes, despite some of the new guidance from the Trump administration.

Do you think we would have seen changes around the margins for these programs even without President Trump's executive orders? Because, as we mentioned, there had been some backlash from DEI even before President Trump returned for a second term. Yes, partly because the court seemed like it was moving in this direction and partly because there has been a backlash to being overly politicized.

about many issues. Companies were willing to make decisions

somewhat political statements, frankly, a couple years ago. They're not willing to do that in the same way anymore. They've tried to move away from that. There was already a push towards, we're going to really emphasize inclusion. We're going to minimize things, you know, the first two letters of the acronym, diversity and equity. You know, diversity, sure, we still believe in that. Equity, maybe people are confused.

There was already that push. That has not necessarily changed, and maybe that's why we're not seeing these massive moves on the part of companies to really further tweak from here.

Really appreciate this, Simone. Thanks again for coming on with us on this Juneteenth edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. That is Bloomberg News reporter Simone Foxman covering equality for Bloomberg News. And up next on this special edition of Daybreak, we'll take a look at big tech still in the crosshairs of antitrust lawsuits. We'll get an update on that from Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Litigation Analyst Jennifer Rigg. It's 20 minutes past the hour. I'm Nathan Hager, and this is Bloomberg.

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Welcome back to this special edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. I'm Nathan Hager. U.S. markets are closed for the Juneteenth holiday. Now, the thinking among many on Wall Street is that antitrust cases against big tech might ease up with the change from the Biden to the Trump administration. Have they? For some answers, let's turn to Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Litigation Analyst,

Jennifer Rhee. Jen, kind of looks like your litigation plate's still pretty full. Is that the case? Is that a surprise? It is very full. And I'll tell you, I don't think it's a surprise. Oh. You know, and the reason I don't think it's a surprise is because people forget that all of these investigations of the big tech platforms that culminated in lawsuits, and in fact, two of the lawsuits started during Trump's first administration.

And they were pursued aggressively by the Biden administration, which picked up the mantle from Trump and kept going with them. And, you know, these cases now, several of them have proceeded to trial. But they were started under Trump. And there's just this feeling, I think, by Trump and most of the people that he's put in place at the FTC and DOJ, that these companies like Meta and Google and Apple are left-leaning companies that have, you know, censored conservative content.

and made it difficult for Trump to win the second time he ran against Joe Biden. And really, they're just not going to give them any breaks, despite the fact that executives from these companies have really tried to curry favor with the president. So it's a different focus in the sense that it might be more around the content that these companies are putting out there, as opposed to more of the anti-competitive nature that we saw during the Biden administration? Well, yes and no. It's about the content.

but I think what they're doing is putting content into the antitrust framework by saying that the lack of competition and the fact that the companies monopolize markets allow them then to control the message. That if there were more alternatives and more competition, they wouldn't have that ability to control the message. So they sort of put it all together, right, into one bucket. So,

So does that mean that as some of these cases go forward against some of the biggest names in the MAG-7, that we could see breakups of these companies? So I think it's unlikely. Now, you have two cases where the DOJ is really aggressively seeking breakup. They're both against Google, by the way. One is about its monopoly maintenance of search, and the other one is about monopoly maintenance of its ad tech products.

And in those cases, what they're asking the judges to do is to force Google in the search case to divest Chrome and in the ad tech case to divest a product they bought a long time ago called DoubleClick. These are products we don't really know about as consumers. They're used by digital publishers and advertisers to get together and sell and buy advertising space online. And Google has all these products and kind of shuffles the publishers and advertisers through all their products to the exclusion of others so that they can take the fees all along the way.

I'll tell you that in both cases, by the way, liability has already been found against Google. They have acted illegally to maintain monopolies in all of these markets. That has already been determined. What the judges now, they're two different judges, are trying to do is determine what the remedies should be to fix this problem. It's not really punishment in the antitrust world, but more let's open up the markets to other competitors and stop this illegal conduct.

I don't think in either case the company is going to be forced to sell off a piece of itself. So starting with Google search, that's the one where the DRJ is asking them to be forced to sell Chrome. In my mind, if you look at the liability decision, that punishment, I'll call it punishment, even though it's not really punishment, doesn't really fit the crime.

I think it's overkill. What they've been found to do that's illegal is enter these agreements with companies like Apple, Verizon, T-Mobile, Samsung that makes their Android phones, to place Google search as the default search engine at internet access points, or to place it, let's say, on a phone, front and center to the exclusion of other search engines. That harmed other engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, because they simply weren't able to get exposure. They weren't able to get the search volume they needed to improve.

And I think you can fix that without having to sell Chrome. You know, there are other ways that can be fixed. So my guess is these remedies, which are going to come out in August, by the way, are going to be a mixture of telling them, hey, you can't have these agreements anymore. You can't pay Apple to put Google search behind Safari, which, by the way, Nathan, they were paying 20 billion a year for that. Yeah, a lot of money. So it's going to hurt Apple, too. Yeah.

And maybe sharing some of the search data you've collected over the years with all of these searches. And also possibly choice screens in Chrome. A person buys a new phone, they open Chrome the first time, they have a choice of what they want to use as their default search engine. And possibly some data sharing, because the data sharing would fix this deprivation of scale and data that allegedly these other search engines needed to get better. Share some of that data, give them a chance to try to get better and to compete, you know,

more vigorously against Google search. Even some of those smaller remedies could be a pretty big hit to Google's not just bottom line, but their overall business practices, couldn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. They have fought hard against some of these data remedies and even the default remedies. Now, they modeled internally, this came out in trial, that if they lost the default search position, it could be up to $32 billion in revenue lost a year, which

Which, I'll be honest, really surprised me because I thought that was awfully high, given that most people really like Google search and might be inclined to put it back as the default if it isn't the default to start. But nonetheless, this could really hurt. And the data sharing could hurt, too. But the whole point is to reduce their market share a little bit and give more market share or allow some of these other competitors to try to gain market share.

Well, on top of the Google multiple antitrust cases, we've had this case against Meta Platforms wrap up in just the last couple of weeks as well. This is a big one where they're talking potentially about spinning off Instagram and WhatsApp. Could it go that far?

You know, I really don't think so. You know, as I said, Google lost on liability on those two trials. I don't even think Meta is going to lose on liability on this one. Wow. You know, and I'll tell you, it's really because it's very, very hard to prove that there was consumer harm. You know, they may have had a bad intent when they bought Instagram and WhatsApp. The intent may have been, let's buy these companies rather than competing with them, which is technically illegal. Right.

But they put a lot of money in. Both of the companies were sort of struggling at the time that they were acquired by Facebook. They put a lot of innovation in. They built the products into something that was really desirable to consumers, which may not have happened if they hadn't done that.

And it's hard to prove that had they not bought these, we call it a but-for world, that they would be the products they are today and that consumers would be better off. And really, that's what had to be proven here by the FTC. And I'm not so sure that they were able to do that. So I think at the end of the day, they're just going to lose on liability. And then this will be done because if FTC loses on liability, there will be no remedy hearings.

Interesting. So is this a case where the FTC might have gotten itself boxed in with meta platforms just from approving the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp all those years ago? Absolutely. I think it was regret. Buyers were remorse there. You know, they approved both of those acquisitions. WhatsApp, I think they didn't even investigate. The Instagram one, they did investigate for six months or so. They allowed both of them. They cleared both of them, as did, by the way, the UK and the EU, which looked thoroughly also at these acquisitions.

And I do think that they regret having done that, and they're trying to fix that now. So could meta platforms be sort of watching its back, though, when it comes to future acquisitions, given that it has had to go through this process over the last couple of months?

Absolutely. And that's one of the issues that they raise with respect to a suit like this. They say, look, you approved these deals years ago in 2012 and 14. How is a company supposed to buy any company and have assurance going forward that 10 years later or five years later, the FTC or DOJ won't come back and say, hey, those were illegal acquisitions, even though we cleared them back when you gave us notice? Absolutely.

And I think it does put companies in a difficult position. And I suspect that Facebook is probably sitting back still watching what's going to happen in merger enforcement with the Trump administration to understand whether they could get a big deal through or not. Now, outside the Federal Trade Commission's purview, the Justice Department is joining with states in going after Apple. What's at issue there?

This is an unusual case because this is about Apple sort of blocking or refusing interoperability or refusing certain apps to be on the mobile iOS that would allow people to get out of the iOS system. In other words, to keep them dependent on the iPhone or their other hardware such as the Apple Watch. So the idea is that...

Yeah.

to be sold through their app store because it could allow less sophisticated technology. Somebody who streams a game can buy less sophisticated technology than an Apple iPhone to play that game.

And so it's about all of this action to try to keep people within iOS buying all of their hardware and keeping them in their system. And this one's really slow. There's no trial date set yet. We're waiting on a motion to dismiss that Apple filed. I don't think they'll win that, Nathan, but that's not a big deal. They're very hard to win.

It's just sort of a first chance to dismiss the complaint rather than getting into discovery. So I think this is going to be a really slow case. And my feeling about it is that I don't think it's necessarily a slam dunk in any way for the DOJ. We're going to have to wait to see how the evidence shakes out here. But I think Apple has a lot of good defenses.

about safety and security and protecting its users, providing its users with the best products, seamless activity with whatever they're doing on the phone. And these can be good defenses in an antitrust suit. And we know that we're in a pretty long wait-and-see mode as well when it comes to the FTC's case against Amazon. Yes. Remind us what's going on there. What's at issue? That has been so slow. And they just pushed back the trial date yet again into 2027 from 2026.

So this is about Amazon requiring sellers on its platform to provide the lowest prices they provide anywhere on Amazon. Now, that sounds good. That should be good for consumers. But the allegation there is that it's more expensive for these sellers to sell on Amazon than their own platform or maybe Etsy or some other platform where they could sell their products. And it causes those prices to go up rather than all of the prices to come down. So it has this price inflating effect here.

Kind of like a most favored nation clause, they think that this is illegal. They also say that if sellers want to have really nice positioning when somebody's searching for a product or they want to be in what they call the prime box, that they have to use Amazon's fulfillment services as well. That also causes a price increase because they're expensive.

This is another one where I think we have to see where the evidence shakes out on the fulfillment side. I think Amazon can make, again, a decent pro-competitive argument that we want to make sure when we promise our buyers that they're going to get a product within two days or one day or today, that they actually do. So we want control over the fulfillment services because we want to make sure that we're good to our word.

They might have a good defense there. On the most favored nation issue, I think it looks like so far that this could actually cause some price-raising effects outside of the platform. But I kind of see it as, well, not really a big deal, because the answer to that, if they're found liable, is you just have to stop doing this. And what that could mean is that you might be able to find a product lower priced outside of Amazon. And I think that would be fine. And I'm not even sure, Nathan, that that would really hurt Amazon.

Amazon's revenue or bottom line in any kind of substantial way. We just went through four of the MAG-7 when it comes to antitrust scrutiny. It sounds as though big tech is still a big priority for this government. Thank you for this, Jen. Really appreciate it. That is Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Litigation Analyst Jennifer Reed. And up next, we'll look at some under-the-radar travel bargains this summer with Nikki Eckstein and Chris Rauser of Bloomberg Pursuits.

It's 37 minutes past the hour. I'm Nathan Hager and this is Bloomberg.

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Thank you so much for joining us on this special edition of Bloomberg Daybreak. U.S. markets are closed for the Juneteenth holiday. I'm Nathan Hager, and we're just about a day away from the official start of summer. So we thought now might be a decent time to look at how travel's looking with many of us maybe thinking about travel.

getting ready for those summer vacations. And who better to check in with on that than our friends at Bloomberg Pursuits, Nikki Eckstein and Chris Rauser here to guide us through summer travel. Thanks so much to both of you for being with us. And I think we're coming off a pretty strong start to unofficial travel season, right? With the Memorial Day weekend behind us. Is that a good indicator of

whether things could be crowded as we embark. Who'd like to tackle that question? Demand is at an all-time high. I think going into 2025, people have been very bullish on travel. People want to get away. People are emotionally exhausted, mentally exhausted from the news cycle.

This is a time where people are still kind of lingering over that pandemic-induced desire to get out and explore the world and not let a single PTO day go wasted. So all that energy is still riding super high, and we're seeing supersized demand. What we are seeing a little bit is people being more value-conscious, people looking at the global economic uncertainty and saying, maybe I should splurge just a smidge less, find a couple of ways to go closer to home, more vacations, but

Smaller radius, shall we say, from whatever your origin point is. Maybe more long weekend trips rather than two-week forays somewhere very far away. But definitely high demand. Yeah, absolutely. So, Chris, where are you seeing that people could get some of that bang for their buck from?

in terms of certain destinations they might be thinking about. Well, one of the things that we've noticed for this year and the past couple of years, actually, is that the Caribbean is no longer a place where travel softens in the summer. People are going for a hot Caribbean summer because prices are...

a little bit more on the reasonable side and resorts are great to be at. The weather actually, because of climate change, the weather actually there is actually kind of more temperate than it is in a lot of other places that you might want to go, especially Southern Europe. So we're seeing a lot of people going there and especially Canadians.

Canadians don't want to go to the U.S. this year. They're really tired of the 51st state rhetoric that's come from our administration lately. And they're really turning to the Caribbean as an alternative. There's a lot of airlines are meeting that demand with direct routes to places like Bermuda is particularly popular with Canadians this year. But even Americans who are saying like, I don't know.

I don't know if I should splurge on that trip to Paris or to whatever, are looking at options a little bit closer to home. They're saying, "I don't need to spend $5,000 a night for the last remaining hotel room on the Amalfi Coast." This is a real thing. The prices are that intense in some of these very tony, established destinations. They're saying, "I can spend a tenth as much and stay at a great resort in Jamaica. Why not do that?"

That's interesting because when you think about the idea of staying close to home, you're talking about the climate out there, not just in terms of the weather, but in terms of the politics. Does that mean that some of those out-of-the-way destinations that maybe some Americans might have thought about maybe one or two years ago are starting to look a little less welcoming now?

When you say out-of-the-way destinations, are you thinking about in Europe? Yeah.

So hotels and restaurants and businesses in Europe want nothing more than Americans to come spend those higher sums than anyone else. What Americans are a little bit worried about, anecdotally from what we've heard, is not receiving as warm of a welcome in terms of how our political standing looks abroad. And so while our dollars might be welcome, there might be some emotional stuff almost that gets in the way.

Also, when it comes to a warm welcome, we should say some of the things we've been writing about for this summer are cool-cations. Literally going places where it is not as hot. You kind of need that.

It's such an amazing place to visit, and there's so many things to do. And there's increasing air access. It's actually easier to get there. And there's more hotels and more sort of glamping resorts. So that's a place that would be great to explore. Sweden also is one of our places that we find a lot of people are going to. Rotterdam has a great new museum, the Fenix Museum, about migration. So we have a lot of recommendations at Pursuits about places to go where it's less explored and it's also less hot.

Does less explored also mean less expensive, Nikki? It sure does. I'm assuming here, I'm sure you've never heard of a place called Skane, Sweden. Am I right making that assumption? I can't say as I have. I didn't want to say it because I was afraid to pronounce it wrong. Well, imagine that you could go to a beautiful countryside destination in Sweden, in

Incidentally, it's about 30 minutes outside of Copenhagen, or 90 minutes, I should say, but very close to a major city. Yet, you've got these rambling estates, almost like what you would find in the British countryside, except it's a little bit more hig, that cozy word that they use. Higa. Higa. You've got these beautiful palatial estates that have been turned into five-star hotels. You have some of the best chefs in Scandinavia are setting up

restaurants in this region. And it's easy to access, you know, major commercial flights in and out of Copenhagen, no problem. And what you're paying for a night at an estate like that

$225 per night at a place called Maryhill Estate, just to throw out one great example. That's fantastic. Another piece of writing that was really interesting that your team has come up with is, it's not just getting a bang out of your buck or a new experience that might be a good reason to do one of these less predictable vacations, perhaps. It could actually be good for your brain, Chris?

Yes. Taking an unpredictable or even scary vacation is actually really good for your brain and it releases more dopamine than a normal good vacation. Something that someone told, an expert told us, which I thought was really interesting, is that what really releases dopamine on a vacation, which is the neurochemical that makes you happy and feel relaxed and having fun, is not when a vacation is good. It's when it's better than expected. Right.

which is a different thing. So we have a great essay by one of our travel writers, Jen Murphy, in Bloomberg Weekend about how if you go to a place that feels like a little bit on edge for you, maybe you're hiking in the wilderness and it's like a challenge or you're going to a new area you've never been or you don't know a lot about, those vacations are actually extremely valuable to waking up

your brain and waking up your senses. We're speaking with Nikki Eckstein and Chris Rauser of Bloomberg Pursuits, getting ready for summer travel. Now, if money is no object, Chris, what's your favorite destination that you're thinking about right now, if you just got money to burn?

That's a great question. I have a lot of things on my list because I have a small child and there's a lot of places I feel like I can't go. But a place I've never been and I'm dying to go is Japan. And we have an incredible writer, Brandon Presser, who does all of our city guides, very, very in-depth city guides called Two Night Minimum. And he recently wrote a story for us.

because he just did a city guide to Kyoto that was like, you know what, you're doing Japan wrong. If you're going to Kyoto, you might be worried about crowds, but actually there's a lot of really great places in Kyoto to explore. If you're just sort of going between Kyoto and Tokyo, there's all these other places that you can go to.

And, you know, these cities are not that easy to penetrate. So if you're not hiring a guide that has local connections and people who can kind of get you into restaurants that seem like there are no reservation or get you into back alleyways that have interesting shops, you kind of need to go with somebody who knows what they're doing and who knows people.

Yeah, you would think so. I mean, you just got to think about, you know, the difficulties of the language in a place like Japan. And you've also been writing about why this maybe could be the year that if you're thinking about that excursion to the Egyptian pyramids, that this really could be the year to do it, Nikki. Oh, yeah. So we actually put...

Egypt on our where to go in 2025 list. If you haven't seen that, that's kind of a master list that we publish every single year at the beginning of the year, offering up vacation ideas that are going to feel particularly timely in the year to come. And Egypt was really at the top of our priority list.

Not the pyramids themselves. Yeah, you can't renovate them. They still hold. They still hold. They still hold.

They haven't been turned into shiny glass skyscrapers, not to worry. But the experience of visiting the pyramids was previously a challenging one in many ways. There were hawkers and sometimes scam artists that would set up around the pyramids. The infrastructure was lacking compared to the grandeur of the site itself.

And Egypt has partnered with a local billionaire to infuse a lot of capital, a lot of more kind of organizational and logistical prowess into making it a site that's worthy of its history and its role in world history. So it is definitely a very, very good time to consider putting that on your list. Plus, the reopening of the pyramids coincides with the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is a very long-awaited institution.

and filled with tens of thousands of objects spanning the entirety of time.

Egypt is the best trip I've ever taken in my life. If it's possibly on your list to anyone, I really recommend going. It's totally unbelievable, and these improvements will be very, very cool. The old Grand Egyptian Museum was like from the mixed-up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It was very disorganized and dusty and incredible because it has King Tut's tomb in there, and now it's in this incredible new –

gleaming giant new facility that's well organized and just really wild. And I have to say, Cairo has always been a jumping off point for the rest of Egypt, and Cairo itself has never been kind of the highlight of the trip. So this really does change a lot of that, but you should still buy yourself as much time as possible to be in Egypt because taking one of those phenomenal masted ships down the Nile, and now they can actually...

set port in all these beautiful ancient cities where there are five-star hotels that have popped up in recent years. I mean, the facilities are just absolutely sumptuous. This is truly living like a king. So cool. And it's not crazy expensive. Yeah, it's a great idea, not even just for this summer, for maybe summers to come as well. But finally, if people are still thinking about staying a little bit close to home, this could be the year for the Great American Resort.

Okay, this is a particular passion of mine. Both of ours. We've been talking about this for years. I've been watching, I've been wondering for a long time, you know, why when we think about resorts, we think about traveling abroad as Americans oftentimes, when really in the U.S. we have this incredibly rich history of resorts and

As we notice that more and more of these old American five-star properties are getting these incredible glow-ups, investments of nearly half a billion dollars in some cases,

It really pushed us down a path of exploring the legacy of the American resort. And we've learned in the process that the concept of the resort, the concept of the luxury resort, is an American creation, which I had no idea. This was a surprise. You think of like European grand resorts on the Grand Tour as like kind of who invented that tradition of a giant hotel in a beautiful place where everything is...

at your fingertips at that resort. Yeah, quite a far cry from the Route 66 motels that I used to go. Thank you for this. Really great to have this conversation, thinking about the kickoff of summer travel. Our thanks to Nikki Eckstein and Chris Rauser of Bloomberg Pursuits. We'd also like to thank Bloomberg Intelligence's Jennifer Rhee and Bloomberg News reporter Simone Foxman. Of course, thank you to you as well for joining us on this Juneteenth holiday.

I'm Nathan Hager. Stay with us. Top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.

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