The most budget-friendly major city over the holidays might surprise you

From the rim of Canyon de Chelly, the view is almost impossibly beautiful. Sheer red sandstone walls plunge hundreds of feet toward a green ribbon of cottonwood trees and cultivated fields. Ancient stone dwellings cling to narrow ledges high above the canyon floor. It’s the sort of landscape that makes you reach for your camera before you’ve even begun to understand what you’re looking at.

But Canyon de Chelly is much more than another spectacular Southwestern landscape. People have lived here for nearly 5,000 years, and unlike most of the great archaeological sites of the Southwest, this is still a place where families live, farm, and maintain deep connections to their ancestral homeland. It’s also the setting for one of the most tragic chapters in American history.

Organizing items in your suitcase or backpack should be a one-time thing, but that’s rarely true. Even if you save space by rolling your clothes and arrange your gear in a Tetris-like formation, things seem to explode the second you land at your destination and unzip your bag. Even worse, dirty laundry and souvenirs make you rethink your whole packing strategy, and staying at multiple properties means that you’ll have to do it over and over again. Thankfully, the FlipSide luggage suite tackles this issue—but did it really make packing easier for me?

I’ve spent much of 2026 testing three of the brand’s bags, including the 22-inch Ryan Carry-On, 26-inch Ryan Checked Bag, and the FlipSide Backpack. And I’m delighted to share that in a world of premium bags to choose from, these actually made a difference. This is largely due to one design element that both improved and simplified my packing experience — a zippered divider that let me split each bag into two distinct packing areas. 

I spend a good portion of the year in Copenhagen, and I have walked past Admiral Hotel Copenhagen approximately one million times. It’s hard to miss. The hulking timber-and-brick warehouse sits right on the harbor along Toldbodgade, a few minutes from Nyhavn, gazing across the water at the Royal Danish Opera House like it’s been there longer than everyone else (It has).

Every time I passed, I had the same thought: I should stay there. Which is a slightly unhinged thing to think about a hotel in the city where you already have a perfectly good bed. But after the hotel wrapped up a multi-year renovation this summer, my boyfriend and I finally gave in and booked a staycation.