What I know, and how
Where I have stood, what standing there lets me see — and, more usefully, what it does not.
I am Alex. I left Taipei at nineteen for a hotel school in Lausanne, spent an exchange semester in Singapore, and four years of weekends on European trains on a student budget. I worked the food-and-beverage floor at Marina Bay SandsSource: Worked thereMarina Bay Sands, F&B floor, 2022–23 and later sold rooms at Four Seasons Tokyo.Source: Worked thereFour Seasons Tokyo, Sales & Marketing, 2024–25
That combination is the only unusual thing about me, and it is worth naming precisely: I know roughly what a nine-hundred-dollar room costs a hotel to deliver, and I also cannot afford one. Writers who get comped know the first thing. Writers on a budget know the second. The gap between them is where this publication lives.
Admitting the limit is the part a content farm will not copy.
So here is the ledger, both sides. The left column is the claim; the right column is what it is actually worth.
Can speak to
How a rate is set, why it moves, and what a hotel is optimising when it moves. I did this for a living, on a real property, with real consequences.
Cannot speak to
Owning or running a hotel. I have never held a P&L. Anything I write about the economics of a whole property is reading and inference, and will say so.
Can speak to
Taipei as a person who grew up in it and then left it, which is a specific and slightly unreliable vantage — the city changed and so did I, and I cannot always tell which of us moved.
Cannot speak to
Most of Asia. I have not been to the majority of the places English-language travel writing treats as interchangeable with Taiwan. Where I write about somewhere I haven’t been, the claim carries a dashed rule and says so.Source: Haven't been
Can speak to
Being twenty-three, on a student budget, inside expensive rooms — because that was the actual arrangement, not a device. Prices in these pieces are what I paid.
Will not do
Publish a place that cannot absorb more of us. Invent a date, a number or a quote — where a figure is not published, you get a window and a note saying so, never a plausible guess. Run an advertisement, an affiliate link or a sponsored piece.
About the name
Revoir is French for to see again. Almost everyone knows it from au revoir and reads it as goodbye, which is the opposite of what it says: au revoir is until we see each other again. A familiar thing that turns out to mean something better than you assumed — that is the move this whole publication is built on.
Not souvenir, which is to remember. Remembering is passive. Seeing again is work. I spent four years in francophone Switzerland; the word is borrowed from somewhere I actually lived.
If something here is wrong, or you have stood somewhere I haven’t, tell me. That is the entire feedback mechanism, on purpose.