This is Window Shopping, a weekly briefing from Window Seat. Every issue covers essential news in luxury travel, spotlights one exceptional hotel, and shares personal updates or recent product discoveries.
American Airlines turned 100 this year and is celebrating with limited-edition luggage made in collaboration with Australian brand July. The collection embodies American’s 1960s Astrojet era, borrowing archival logos and signature red and blue for a range of bags. It’s a fun bit of airline nostalgia timed to a very big birthday, and personally I’m very here for airlines mining their archives in this way.
AI is coming to air traffic control. What could go wrong! This week, the FAA started using a new AI-powered system called SMART at three major Washington, D.C. area airports with the goal of expanding it nationwide. The system analyzes things like airline schedules, weather, airport capacity, and airspace conditions and centralizes it into one platform. Decision-makers stress that it’s meant to support the humans controlling the airspace, not replace them, but many still have concerns like, where will the data come from? Will the tool hallucinate? And if so, will humans still have the final say or the ability to override it?
Air France is calling dibs on the biggest lounge in JFK’s new Terminal One. As part of JFK’s massive ongoing redevelopment, the existing Terminal 1 is being replaced with a completely new terminal, and when Air France moves in, it’s bringing a two-story, 29,000-square-foot lounge with it—which is also the largest planned for the terminal and the biggest Air France lounge outside of Paris. There will be room for more than 400 passengers, plus French dining, a wine and Champagne bar, beauty treatments, and a dedicated area reserved for Flying Blue Ultimate members. Between this and the long list of genuinely great lounges that have opened at JFK lately, the pre-flight experience in New York is getting increasingly competitive…
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I love testing out different personal items for different kinds of flights. I recently got this canvas-and-leather tote, which I took on my last international flight, and somehow it swallowed everything I could possibly keep on my person without turning into one of those enormous, unwieldy bags I wish I hadn’t brought. It’s huge, but still sits nicely on my shoulder and, crucially, has both a trolley pass-through and a key leash so 1) I can slide it over my carry-on instead of lugging it through the airport, and 2) I’m not awkwardly digging through my bag for my keys when I finally get home. The one design flaw: it magnetizes shut instead of zipping (my preference and I’m sure a lot of yours), but it’s tall enough that I never worried about my things spilling out.
Sunyata Ren’ai Hall Hotel — Chongqing, China
Chongqing has been on my travel wishlist for a minute now, but this intimate hotel in the city’s historic Yuzhong district is making me want to book a flight ASAP. The hotel used to be a church and a hospital, originally built in 1900 by the French. Now, it’s a 25-room hotel that boasts two restaurants, a riverside bar, and rooms that look out over the Yangtze River and Chongqing’s almost surreal skyline. The design is a main attraction here: you can see the layered warm woods, stone, plentiful paper shade lighting, and timber beams, which are original from the hotel’s storied past.
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Window Seat covers the intersection of luxury hospitality, aviation innovation, and the culture of modern travel, written by Tori Simokov, a writer and designer based in New York. For partnership opportunities: tori@v1projects.com. You can also connect with her on Instagram, TikTok, or ShopMy.
On my last flight I was actually thinking about the AI thing, crazy it is already in use!