How to Get Insider Access When You Travel (Without a Diplomatic Passport)

It wasn't the galas. It wasn't the diplomatic passport. It was the access.

Someone asked me recently what the best perk of being a U.S. diplomat actually was, expecting me to say something about protocol or motorcades. But the real perk was quieter than that: doors that opened because of a title, conversations I got invited into because of a badge, rooms I was simply allowed to be in.

A dinner in someone's actual home in Muscat — not a restaurant, someone's real table, someone's mother cooking. A wedding in Sarajevo I had no business attending except that I'd stayed long enough that someone wanted me there. A holiday I wasn't born into, celebrated by people who'd decided, at some point, that I counted.

Here's what I didn't understand until I'd left the title behind: that access was never really the badge. Twenty years of embassies means twenty years of people — the winemaker in Piedmont I met over dinner in 2009, the hotel manager in Geneva who still remembers my name, colleagues from Baghdad who are now running vineyards and hotels and consulting practices of their own. The badge opened the first door, once. The relationships are what still open every door now, years later, with no badge at all.

So the access didn't disappear. It just stopped being about a title and started being about two decades of people who took my call once and still will. Knowing who to call. Knowing where to go. That instinct doesn't retire when you do.

That's the whole business, if I'm honest. Sojourn & Soirée isn't itineraries. It's twenty-some years of relationships, put to work for someone other than the State Department.

I put together a free guide on building that kind of access yourself, wherever you're headed next — link below. Or just follow along here. I write about this stuff most Mondays, badge or no badge.