The Renaissance Sectors have acquired a reputation within contemporary travel culture that extends well beyond the romance traditionally associated with distant territory. They are neither an untouched frontier nor a collection of relics waiting to be rediscovered, but inhabited, prosperous, complicated societies whose appeal comes from the fact that they continued developing throughout their long separation and now meet the wider Empire on their own accumulated terms.

Their hotels, universities, ports, markets, beaches, museums, estates, entertainment districts, wilderness reserves, restaurants, commercial exchanges, and historic cities belong to living cultures rather than reconstructed antiquity, and visitors are as likely to encounter something newly fashionable as something impossibly old.

The great pleasure of traveling through the Renaissance Sectors is therefore not the sensation of leaving civilization behind, but discovering just how many forms civilization has taken beyond the familiar horizons of the Core. For an Imperial traveler accustomed to believing the galaxy already well catalogued, few destinations offer a stronger reminder of how much remains to be seen.