Travel Tips From the Man Who’s Visited Every Country on Earth—and Space

tech.hindustantimes.com:

At Bloomberg Pursuits, we love to travel. And we always want to make sure we’re doing it right. So we’re talking to globe-trotters in all of our luxury fields—food, wine, fashion, cars, real estate—to learn about their high-end hacks, tips, and off-the-wall experiences. These are the Distinguished Travel Hackers.

The 57-year-old entrepreneur and investor says he’s the only person on Earth to have visited all 193 UN-recognized countries as well as space—he was part of the civilian crew on Blue Origin’s rocket, the same trip on which comedian Pete Davidson was originally scheduled to fly in March. 

In addition to that  62-mile milestone, Kitchen estimates he’s logged from 7 million to 10 million miles in the air—at least 3 million of them with American Airlines. His favorite carrier, though, is Emirates. “It’s just the wood paneling in those business class suites, those enormous video screens, the best beds,” he says, “Gosh, I hate to admit this publicly, but I still think I have one of their blankets.”

Having worked in various ways in the travel industry for most of his career, including founding (and selling) group tour company SBT, he now acts as an angel investor and serves as a professor focusing on entrepreneurship at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he lives with his wife Susan. Here are some of the globetrotter’s top travel tips.

I had taken a bike tour and we had played the uniquely Colombian game of tejo: You throw, like, a 3-pound weight—and there’s a circle—and if you hit in the center of the circle, the whole thing explodes. My guide asked me when we were playing, “So where’s next?” And I said, “Oh, tomorrow I’m flying to Venezuela.” And he’s like, “In those shoes?” I had a pair of running shoes