About The Layover
For crew, by crew. Since 2012.
How a layover in Paris turned into the best travel-intel network in the sky, and what we built next.
I started keeping notes on cities in 2012, off the back of a layover in Paris. Third trip of my flying career, and half the cabin spent twenty-four hours in one of the great food cities on earth watching Netflix in the hotel. I'd taken the job to eat my way around the world, and I couldn't understand why there was nowhere for crew to pool what we knew. So I started a Facebook group for Emirates crew, and I started keeping my own files on every city I landed in, by hand.
We hit three thousand members in a couple of months. That's when I knew it wasn't a nice idea. It was a need.
Fourteen years later, it's around thirty thousand of us. And here's the number I still can't get over: roughly seventy percent are active every single month. The average online group runs two or three. It was never really a Facebook group. It's a crew room with thirty thousand chairs, and almost everybody shows up.
What makes it work isn't seniority. It's attitude. People fresh off their first flight, lifers with twenty years of wings, and the magic is the same: everyone is from somewhere, everyone brings something to the table. Traveler, not tourist. That's the whole thing.
Why We Left Facebook
For years, companies came wanting to monetize the group. None of them wanted to build the thing I actually wanted, so I always said no.
What changed: a lifelong friend, an ex-Apple engineer and two-time Harvard graduate, finally sat down to build it with me. And I'd grown allergic to keeping fourteen years of crew knowledge on a platform that could delete it tomorrow on a whim.
So we built our own home. This is it.
What The Layover Is
Thirty city guides at launch, growing to ninety over the next few months, written the way this community always has: for crew, by crew, for the rotation and not the vacation. Halal-aware. Multicultural-first, because we always were. Honest about the scams. Refreshed every week, because a guide that was right in 2019 is wrong today.
The Briefing Room, the free weekly newsletter, is the thank-you. It lands every Tuesday, and it stays free. Always.
The full catalog is for members, and it pays for itself on a single layover.
Who Is Writing This
Me. Most of you know me as Mr. Admin. That's been me behind the group this whole time. I flew the network for years, then hung up my wings, but I never stopped documenting. I'm not a brand or a media company. I'm crew who started writing it all down on the line in 2012 and never quit.
It began in one airline's crew room. But the guides are for anyone who flies the world for a living. If that's you, you're in the right place.
And you know the rule by now:
Don't stay in the hotel.
-- Trevor (Mr. Admin)
Support The Layover
The Briefing Room stays free, and every bit of support helps us keep improving the guides, checking fresh city notes, and building useful crew tools around the way layovers actually work. If The Layover has helped you plan a better stop, you can leave a small tip here: support The Layover.