Hello, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and welcome to an episode of Women Who Travel, where we set out to challenge what it means to be a tourist.

A bucket list and guidebooks, a good thing or a bad thing? Should we actually be using the word

wonder lust? And why do some passports gain more

visa-free access to countries than others? I started getting interested in all these conditions

that came about as a result of colonialism, as a result of the way our passports are structured,

as a result of the way guidebooks prioritize certain perspectives,

and how that history then shapes modern tourism.

Asking all these questions and more is my guest, Shainez Habib, who grew up in a small town

in Kerala in South India, went to Delhi for college, and now lives in Brooklyn.

When her father travels from India to visit her,

he thoroughly enjoys exploring just a few streets around her apartment.

He finds it perfectly fulfilling, he says.

It's a perspective that's reshaping her own outlook on travel

and is the genesis of her book, Airplane Mode,

an irreverent history of travel.

I am really interested in how travel is a really

consumerist activity at the heart of it. We have all these noble aspirations around travel.

And we're often told you're not buying a thing you're experiencing the world. But there is a lot

of consumerism involved in that,

within that experiencing. And the global tourism industry is so clever addressing up this

consumerist activity as this sort of educational or self-care activity. At the start of the book,

Shaynaz is in a hostel in Istanbul,

...