R+R's destinations barred from coverage

R+R's destinations barred from coverage is a handwritten office list that records places the travel publication will not cover, at least for a time. Maintained by Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith, it makes her suspicion of travel trends visible: a destination gaining fashionable attention may already be too late for R+R. Because cities can eventually be removed, the list is less a permanent blacklist than a record of editorial timing, and its revisions become a ritual shared by the office.

Purpose and Editorial Logic

Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith judges destinations by their position in the trend cycle. She considers being on trend a sign of arriving late, and if she senses that interest in a place such as Toruń, Poland, is warming, she may take it off the agenda for years. Toruń is explicitly not on the list, but its mention illustrates how closely the policy tracks emerging fashion rather than simply recording places the publication has already covered.

The list also sits within a publication balancing different ideas of travel. Poppy Wright describes her usual posts as focused on traveling on a budget and making the most of limited resources, while recognizing that an audience of about one hundred thousand followers may expect the familiar spectacle of a beach vacation. Her account of Sanibel Island unsettles that image: over a week, she and Alex Nilsen spent only about forty minutes on the shore, passing much of the rest of their time in restaurants, bars, bookstores, vintage shops, and their rented bungalow. The discrepancy between the expected destination experience and the actual trip echoes the list’s resistance to treating fashionable travel imagery as the whole story.

How the List Works

The list is physically pushpinned to a wall near the cubicles. Each entry is in Swapna’s handwriting and carries a date, giving the policy a visible history rather than leaving it as an unspoken preference. The staff have even formed an underground betting pool on when a city will be freed from the list. Its rules are therefore understood not only through the destinations named but through the office’s collective anticipation of their eventual release.

When Swapna comes in with her designer laptop bag and a pen ready, the office watches to see which city she will cross off. Once she has gone into her office and shut the door, someone nearby runs to inspect the list, then whispers the scratched-out city’s name to the editorial staff. The quiet celebration turns a small act of editorial judgment into a shared event: the destination’s status changes in public, while the reason for the change remains Swapna’s to decide.

Paris and the Office Ritual

Paris’s release from the list the previous fall shows how the staff turn revisions into playful ceremony. Someone opened champagne, and Garrett produced a red beret he had apparently been keeping in his desk for the occasion. He wore it for the day, snatching it off whenever the office heard Swapna’s door click and whine, as though the celebration might yet be discovered.

Swapna caught him on her way out and said, “Au revoir, Garrett.” Garrett’s face turned as red as the beret. Though Swapna seemed to mean the remark as a joke, he did not quite recover his confidence. The episode gives the list a social life beyond its editorial function: staff members follow its decisions closely, but their enthusiasm also makes them vulnerable to Swapna’s teasing.

Coverage, Timing, and the List’s Reach

The list operates alongside other judgments about what R+R can publish and when. When Poppy Wright proposes Palm Springs for a work-funded trip, Swapna considers the idea but notes that the publication would have to hold it for the winter issue because summer is the destination’s low season. Poppy argues that a summer visit could be less crowded and cheaper, connecting the pitch to her budget-travel roots; Swapna’s response that the brand is aspirational exposes a separate editorial pressure. The list’s trend-conscious exclusions are thus part of a workplace where destination coverage is also shaped by season and brand identity.

Poppy’s later account of her R+R assignments sharpens the contrast between travel as published product and travel as human contact. She says the trips changed after she got the job: instead of meeting people through chance encounters, she encountered chefs and hotel managers seeking coverage, and returned from impressive trips feeling empty. In another work-trip pitch, she imagines arriving at a resort with Alex Nilsen and their ratty T.J. Maxx luggage, only to be greeted with champagne. Together these details show the world around the list as one where travel is evaluated, presented, and sometimes staged for an audience. The list’s distinctive intervention is to make trendiness itself a reason to withhold coverage—and to let the office watch for the moment that judgment changes.