A Travel Plan for Couples Who Don’t Agree on How to Travel
It takes work to bridge the gap when one member of a couple is Type A and the other is spontaneous
4 min
Forget about household chores and budgets. The biggest source of tension for some couples starts with a plane ticket.
You like to get to the airport early , they like to come in hot. You insist on checking a bag, they preach carry-on only. And then there’s the vacation to-do list: You need down time, they have FOMO if they don’t see everything.
What’s a conflicted couple to do? Instead of complaining about, or showing contempt for, your partner’s travel habits, learn to love each other’s quirks, tastes and temperaments. After all, you could both be right. Getting that advance ticket for a hot museum may be the only way to see it, and you may be surprised how nicely that afternoon nap hits you.
Short of separate vacations , the best way to address travel differences, a therapist and travelers who have (mostly) figured it out told me, is communication and compromise. You don’t have to be in a relationship to benefit from their lessons. The advice also applies to traveling with friends and family.
Learning to do less
When planning his honeymoon a dozen years ago, Chris McEwen drew up a long list of must-sees in Italy. His wife-to-be, who prefers leisurely mornings and wandering, wasn’t having it.
She told him, “Yo, pump the brakes dude. We are not doing all that,” McEwen, a 49-year-old IT professional in North Carolina, says.
In the end, he relented. And today, one of his favorite memories from the trip is spending hours walking around Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood at the end of their trip. He finally understood the joys of not doing much.
In the years since, they have continued to compromise. He still darts out of bed on vacation, but heads out for a walk and brings back coffee.
On a spring break trip to Arizona with their children, ages 5 and 9, this year, she agreed to his bucket-list slot canyon tour in Page, Ariz., despite also planning to see Scottsdale, the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park.
For an upcoming trip to New York City, he’ll go to a Broadway show with her (but not two).
Some travelers find middle ground. Others discover that the opposite approach that their significant other takes can work for them.
Valerie Paxton, a 61-year-old business adviser who lives near Phoenix, rarely takes a trip without creating a spreadsheet or Word document with every little detail. For an upcoming trip to Italy to celebrate her brother’s 60th birthday, the entries include the types of wine that will be served during a nearly $400 wine-pairing luncheon at Antinori winery in Tuscany.
She has travel-planning documents dating back to 2008 and says she will defend her meticulous planning “to my dying day.”
Her engineer husband isn’t convinced all the stressful planning work is necessary. “He’s like, ‘Why don’t you just not do it and we’ll just wing it?’ ” Paxton says. “And that’s where the tension is.”
He likes nothing more than seeing where the day takes them by talking to locals. She used to consider it a waste of time. On a trip to Napa for his 55th birthday last month, they had not a single plan. She didn’t even know the location of the vacation rental. They went on a 24-mile bike ride and then stopped into a local bar the shop owner recommended. At the bar, they got their recommendation for dinner.
“I may be a convert,” she says.
Travel as therapy
Psychologist Joshua Coleman counsels couples in his San Francisco-area practice and says travel issues are no different than many other conflicts in a relationship. Resolving them comes down to mutual, thoughtful conversation, he says.
“If people really feel understood and they emerge feeling like, OK, that person really gets me, they’re just in a much better position to want to compromise,” he says.
No good comes from simply giving in about, say, that weeklong vacation you’re dreading and then stewing about it. The other person will pay a price later, he says.
Coleman and his wife have been married for 35 years and found a workaround to their different vacation tastes. He loves activity and she loves relaxing at the pool or beach with a book. On a recent family trip to Hawaii they made time for lounging and a snorkeling excursion.
“If every vacation was a beach-read vacation, she would be completely happy and I would be completely insane,” he says.
Veteran Wall Street airline analyst Jamie Baker and his wife are travel pros who eloped nearly 30 years ago to take immediate advantage of his flight benefits at Northwest Airlines.
They decided early on to stay in their own lanes, he says. He handles all flight arrangements and his wife, a former chef, handles accommodations and dining reservations.
Baker is the stereotypical airport dad—on steroids. He insists his wife and adult sons are packed 24 hours before the flight in case their flight is significantly delayed or canceled and there’s an opportunity to jump on an earlier flight.
He’s gone so far to book a “chase car” in addition to his regular car service. This second car trails his travel party by about 5 miles, just in case.
The backup ride saved a trip to Japan several years ago after a tractor trailer accident brought traffic to a standstill. That car picked them up on the other side of the freeway and they dashed across the median with their rollaboards.
Baker says his preflight neurosis has gotten worse over the years because he can check air-traffic control, flight status, road conditions and more from his phone. His family has come to accept his flight prep as gospel, he says, and knows not to talk to him until they are at the airport.
“Once we’re at the curb, it’s all smiles and relief,” he says.
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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