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As a lifelong traveler, I was despaired this holiday season to witness the new low that has arrived at our airports and how American travel companies are participating in their own demise and demonization.

Countless articles have been written about how the glamour has gone out of travel. The days when one dressed up to board a plane or chatted with cabin mates over Champagne have been replaced with mobs of people in their track suits eating fast food out of paper bags. I’ve accepted that air travel has become mass transit. My consolation: the number of airline passengers traveling globally has grown from 108 million in 1960 to 2.25 billion in 2007, so quantity wins out over quality. After all, the benefit of more people seeing the world outweighs the loss of cachet.

Of course, 9/11 and the new security controls degraded the passenger process further. There is no dignity in shuffling around in your socks in front of strangers while laying out your toiletry items for all to see. But at least the security gauntlet is one that has to be run by all, and is not arbitrarily meted out by disgruntled airline employees.

Unfortunately, what I experienced last week added injustice to indignity. For the past four years, my family and I have traveled after Christmas from New York to Salt Lake City for a week of skiing. We send our ski clothes ahead so we can avoid the long lines at check-in and travel only with carry-on. (Yes, convenience trumps fashion.) This year, however, after we printed our boarding passes at the self-service check-in kiosks, a Delta agent stopped us before we could proceed to security.

“You have to check those bags,” he said, motioning to our roller bags. We pointed out that the bags are designed to fit in the overhead bin and we always travel with them. “Well, if they don’t fit in this square, you have to check them,” he said. There was a board painted with measurements 22 inches by 14 inches. We placed our luggage against the measurements; all of them fit within the painted outlines but two extended slightly over the edge of the base. “Those will have to be checked.”

Another family arrived pulling similar bags. “You have to check all of those,” the man commanded. He was now joined by a grimacing female cohort, who nodded. “But we just bought them at Macy’s and were told that they were regulation,” said the father in the group. The Delta enforcer shook his head, no. “Unless you can zip them to be narrower, you have to check them.”

It was clear that if we were going to make our flight, we would have to follow his edict, but as my husband went to check in the two bags, I watched as some with larger bags were waved through and others weren’t. On December 5, 2008 Delta instituted bag fees of $15 for the first bag and $25 for the second checked bag. Could this be why the employees were suddenly getting so strict about size limits? Daniel LeSieur and his wife from Portland were also sent to wait in the long line to check bags, even though they had carried the same ones on board on their flight East. The additional cost: $150. “It’s outrageous,” LeSieur said. “These bags fit overhead but they can now make money from telling me no.”

Keith Rang, who was on his way up to Buffalo for his bachelor party (He’s a Bills fan), worried about missing his flight and had a duffel bag. He tried to pile on enough sweaters and shirts from his bag so that he could shrink it down to fit in the luggage lines. Despite being amused at his labor of layering, the agents still made him check it.

A gentleman flying to Spain, who also had traveled with his suitcase as carry-on coming over the Atlantic, was forced to check his bag and when he returned with a camera around his neck and a hanging passport pouch, in addition to his knapsack, was told that he couldn’t have two personal items. As soon as I began taking names and snapping pictures, the enforcer called over security. “Are you traveling today?” he asked me. “Yes, my husband is checking a bag.” He asked a friend of the man headed to Spain, who was challenging the agent, to leave the terminal if he wasn’t traveling. “I can be inside if I want,” he said. “No,” security threatened. “You must step outside.” Why? Because he was pointing out Delta’s bag scam to other passengers?

When we finally did pass through security and got to the gate, we found ourselves surrounded by passengers with bags much larger than those we had checked. They had come through a different entrance. I have been reading Margaret Atwood’s wonderful meditation on debt, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. One of her central tenets is that a system of debt and credit rely on “our sense of fairness.” She notes that even in chimpanzee societies, fair play must exist.

I may have felt that the security guy stifling free speech was an anti-democratic gesture, but at a more basic, animal level, I was outraged at the unfairness of rules applying to me but not to others. As Atwood remarks, “If fairness is completely lacking, the members of the chimpanzee group will rebel; at the very least, they’re unlikely to join in a group hunt next time.” That’s how we are hard-wired, but my saga wasn’t over.

After we collected our bags in Salt Lake, we arrived at the Hertz car rental desk to be told that our pre-paid reservation wouldn’t be honored. “We’re out of cars,” the manager told us. But we had a confirmation number, even a voucher, showing that we had paid in full for a four-wheel drive. “We don’t have any cars,” the manager repeated, and then motioned to the man behind us in line, who was holding his Hertz Gold car. He looked at his confirmation number and handed the man a pair of car keys. “Hey,” a man down the desk from us shouted. “You said that you had no more cars. I paid in July.” Yes, I thought, but your money is not quite as golden as that man’s. Cajoling and complaining led to another set of car keys materializing for us, but then the manager pulled out a ‘Closed’ sign. Dozens of people in line-and more still arriving on flights-had no cars, not even anyone to complain to. Did Hertz or Delta management care that they are actively discouraging travel just as the industry is facing its steepest predicted decline in a decade? They don’t seem to.

I have spent more than a decade trying to inspire people to travel the world, and now I cannot blame many for just wanting to stay home.

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As more and more cities around the world start to look the same, it’s a pleasure to spend even a day in one that retains its distinct character. I spent fewer than twenty-four hours in Zurich last week, but experienced a real traveler’s high from its pure Zurichness. For a number of years, it’s been ranked as “the city with the highest quality of life in the world,” according to Mercer ratings. But more telling than a survey may be that Google chose to base its largest engineering office outside the U.S. here. Okay, it was lightly snowing when I arrived, with flurries evoking a fairytale mindset and casting a softness to the city lights and illuminated medieval church towers. When my cab turned off the fashionable Bahnhofstrasse into the narrow cobblestoned streets of the Old Town, the Catholic Church came into view with a spray of evening stars projected upon its façade, and then around the next corner, we entered a small square dwarfed by a towering Christmas tree strung with lights.

My favorite hotel, the Widder, epitomizes how the city blends old and new in Swiss fashion. A collection of nine historic townhouses in the heart of the Old Town shopping area, it is a masterpiece of preservation and renovation. The sleek, all-glass elevator cabins whir up and down with a wall of windows facing the garden on one side and an exposed medieval wall of piled stones on the other. Some guest rooms feature 16th century frescoes and Mies van der Rohe furniture; others blend Eames chairs and beamed ceilings; the penthouse has a sleek terrace with views of church spires and its own original Robert Rauschenberg. Mine felt like a modernist’s attic apartment with steel and glass tables and lamps accenting Biedermeier pieces; a Baroque console fit for an Italian church hid the minibar. Because all the details are genuine, artistic and at home, the mingling of old and new feels considered not contrived—just like the surrounding area.

Widdergasse could contend for one of Europe’s most picturesque streets. Centuries-old houses with gables and painted facades, wooden shutters and wrought-iron detailing now contain stylish shops and trendy eateries. At one end sits an ancient square and at the other runs the pedestrian shopping street Rennweg. On the night that I wandered the area, church bells tolled and children played outside of an ancient guild hall turned restaurant, while their parents ate inside. The restaurants and bars were packed, from modern ones, like Munz with its vast glass walls and skinny-legged steel chairs, to the Cantinetta Antinora, a charming building, where diners could be seen in the upstairs windows framed by antique wooden shutters. Lumiere, the French brasserie where I savored coq au vin, felt more authentic than any in Paris, because a Gitanes smoky haze suffused the place (no smoking ban here).

Influences from all its border countries (Italy, Austria, Germany, France) inform Zurich’s food and culture. In fact, thirty percent of its 370,000 inhabitants are foreigners, so its melting pot mentality thrives. Zoogle, as the Zurich-based Google is called, arrived four years ago and will soon have a new large (and green) office in the Hurlimann Areal. Its 300 Zooglers (employees) come from more than forty countries, joining the Swiss brigade of workers who walk and bike across the city bridges to work and spend weekends skiing in the Alps in winter and hiking or swimming in summer. Lake Zurich has gone from being too dirty to swim in only a decade ago to being so clean that the tap water served in restaurants consists of 70 percent lake water. The city prides itself on having a greater density of “bathing facilities” (Swiss for places to swim) than anywhere else in the world. So there Sydney, LA and Cape Town. In summer, riverfront lounges buzz all day and evening with patrons taking a plunge before, after—and sometimes midway through—a meal. Water also provides sixty percent of the country’s energy, making Switzerland a clean power leader.

Detractors may accuse the Swiss of stubbornly holding on to their traditions, of being conservative about embracing change, but frankly, they seem to know what’s worth changing and what’s worth holding on to, and that’s helped them carve out a city that stands apart. The Paradeplatz, a former pig and cattle market, in the city center has been cleaned up and now lures art lovers and shoppers with new galleries and their neighboring boutiques and cafes. Across the lake, too, landmark buildings have been reinvigorated with elegant restaurants and coffee houses, such as the just-opened Goethe House, next to the Opera House.

When I had breakfast there, a transplant pointed out that he feels the city is emerging as a refuge for people who could live anywhere but want to live in a place that doesn’t feel like anywhere else. Just as there’s a growing trend in fashion against global homogeneity, so do I think the next decade will see a renewed appreciation for places that revel in their unique cultural identity. Zurich fits that bill.

Read a review of the Widder Hotel.

Read more suggestions on Zurich Highlights.

Read our insider’s guide to St. Moritz.

In light of the recent events in Mumbai, members have inquired about the current state of the city. Mr. P.R.S. Oberoi, the Chairman of the Oberoi Group, sent this update on the staff and guests at the Oberoi and the Trident, two hotels affected by the attacks. Our thoughts are with the Indian people and the families of the victims as they recover from this tragedy.

“The last few days have been traumatic for all of us. In these circumstances, I would like to recognize the heroism shown by the law enforcement agencies and by our staff. They have risked their lives for the safety of our guests and in doing so some of them have made the supreme sacrifice.

We have received hundreds of messages of support and sympathy from people in India and from around the world. We all must stand united against such acts of terrorism. These acts of terrorism seek to disrupt our normal daily lives. If we bow down to such pressure, we are helping the terrorists to succeed in their mission.

Our hearts go out to the families of all those who have lost their lives or have been injured due to this act of terrorism. Tragically, four resident guests, eighteen visitors who were dining in our restaurants and ten of our staff members lost their lives. Of the four resident guests, three were foreigners. Three resident guests, four visitors and two of our staff members were injured and are presently in hospital. Had it not been for the courage and presence of mind shown by our staff members, the casualties may have been much more.

One-hundred-thirty-five guests were evacuated from the Oberoi and three-hundred-sixteen guests were evacuated from the Trident hotel. During the ordeal, many resident guests called our executives and the helpline number we had announced on our website and on the television channels. All those guests who called were advised to stay in their rooms till the arrival of the rescue teams. This saved the lives of many people.

We are assessing the damage of the Trident and the Oberoi. From our preliminary assessment, the damage at the Oberoi appears to be much more than at the Trident. At this point, to is very difficult to tell you when we can re-open each of these hotels. However, our effort is to open both hotels as soon as we can.”