Travelites

  Hands Off! The 10 Worst Cities in the World for Tourist Pickpocketing By ICON Tours  |  The Travelites Blog You’ve spent months planning your dream vacation. The flights are booked, the hotel is sorted, and you’ve got a list of must-see sights that could fill a novel. But somewhere between snapping a selfie at the Eiffel Tower and navigating the chaos of a Roman metro station, a professional thief has already sized you up, chosen their moment, and relieved you of your wallet, phone, or passport—often without you feeling a thing. Pickpocketing is one of the oldest crimes in the world, and in 2026, it remains one of the most common threats facing international travelers. It is rarely violent, almost never prosecuted, and staggeringly efficient. In cities like Rome, police recorded over 33,000 pickpocketing cases in a single year—and that only counts the ones that were reported. The real numbers are far higher. What makes modern pickpocketing so effective is that it has ev...

If you are one of those readers who pines for recent days when you could pick up a book while sipping a double, soy, decaf caramel latte in an Ikea chair at one of those ubiquitous franchise bookstores, well, you won't want to read any further. Unlike Northern Europe and North America, the franchise bookstore bubble never came to Portugal. We don't have empty big-box stores or vacant mall galleries where trendy, plastic wood shelves once offered a formulated list of bestsellers and coffee. Thankfully, this is one franchise movement that passed by Portugal's recent gentrification. As a self-admitted bookworm, perusing family-owned bookstores filled with dusty old leather volumes, tattered stacks of printed ephemera, postcards, comic books, and antique engraved prints is a favorite activity that I usually reserve for those rare rainy winter days in Lisbon. I can easily let a few hours slip by that should have been spent responding to important phone calls and emails, and...