That's what Budget Travel is asking its readers before publishing their own list. You can have your say here. I find it interesting that they've asked their readers to submit travel wish lists before releasing their own. Last year, the New York Times travel section came out with a controversial list of 53 places you should should go that received hundreds of comments and provoked some rather passionate debate. If anything, what the overwhelming response from NYT readers demonstrated was that when you get it wrong travellers aren't going to hesitate to let you know. Perhaps Budget Travel is thinking it's better to play it safe and gauge trends first. Or perhaps the editorial team can't agree themselves. What do you think?The image? Morocco naturally, a perennially popular destination with travellers, and with a number of fascinating cities that still aren't on the mass tourism travel radar yet - I'm surprised we're not seeing those on any wish lists.
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We all love a good list, don't we? The travel media have been busy publishing their 'places to go in 2009' lists, the hot 'new' destinations that guidebook publishers and travel publications think you should visit this year, 'it' places they want everyone talking about. Last year I posted a list based on places I'd been that I believed more travellers should visit and it included: Syria, Buenos Aires, Morocco (by road), Western Australia, Antwerp & Brussels, Thailand (road trip rather than beach holiday), Istanbul, Baltic Cities (Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius), Dubai, and Oman. I chose destinations I felt were emerging (the Baltic Cities), often overlooked (Syria, Oman), underrated (Western Australia, Antwerp), misunderstood (Brussels, Dubai), too hot to ignore (Buenos Aires, Istanbul), and places I felt people should experience differently to how they ordinarily might (Thailand and Morocco, which I encouraged people to drive). I'm still mulling over my list for 2009, which I'll share with you tomorrow. For now, here's a taste of the travel media's 2009 lists:* CONDE NAST TRAVELER/CONCIERGE: Tel Aviv, Bolivia, Utah, Acapulco,Vilnius, Central Philippines, New York City, Rajasthan, Toronto, and Beirut.
* DK TRAVEL GUIDES: Vilnius, Buenos Aires, Gdansk, Seattle, Bristol, Fez, Washington DC, Copenhagen, Cape Town, and Vienna.
* LONELY PLANET: top 10 countries: Algeria, Bangladesh, Canada, Georgia, Greenland, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Peru, Rwanda and Sierra Leone; and top 10 cities: Antwerp, Beirut, Chicago, Glasgow, Lisbon, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Warsaw, and Zurich.
* FROMMER'S: Cartagena; Cape Town; Saqqara, Egypt; Washington DC; Waterton Lakes National Park, Canada; Civil Rights Trail, Alabama, USA; Lassen Volcano National Park, USA; Berlin; Belfast; Istanbul; Cambodia (But Not Angkor Wat); and Waiheke Island, New Zealand.
It's interesting to see the same places popping up, such as Vilnius, Beirut, Istanbul, and Oman. I've long been bewitched by Beirut myself (Terry and I wrote two editions of Lonely Planet's Syria and Lebanon guide, and wrote the Lebanon chapter for the first edition some 5 years ago), but the city hasn't yet stabilized and I can't see it having wide appeal. Ditto Georgia, where heavy fighting with Russia occurred in July this year, and Sierra Leone, where UN peace-keepers pulled out just eight years ago. But part of the point of these lists is to provoke discussion, get us excited about traveling, and influence us into buying books and magazines, isn't it? So, what do you think of the various hot lists floating around?
Pictured? That's the Corniche in Muscat, Oman.
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Hot new travel destination lists... don't you love them? Well, don't you?
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Thursday, January 1, 2009
If you read Hotel Chatter, Hotel Hotsheet or Happy Hotelier, you'd hardly think hotels were going out of style, however, I'm starting to see evidence to suggest otherwise. As much as I love browsing i-escape, tablet hotels and Mr & Mrs Smith, checking in to a design hotel or lolling about at a luxury resort, I'm beginning to think hotels might be going out of fashion. For starters, all of the other sleeping alternatives are on the rise, whether it's apartment and villa rentals (including renting direct from owners), B&Bs, agriturismo, 'cool camping'/glamping, RVing or caravanning. An increasingly devalued US dollar has made European hotels too expensive for Americans, leading US travellers to look for other accommodation options on the Continent this summer. As a result, the apartment rental business is booming, with help from the US travel media's ongoing coverage of 'Affordable Europe'. Those not feeling the pain of the diminishing dollar seem simply to want more interesting and intimate hotel experiences. We're seeing the shift as we travel around and see how others are travelling. More and more people are opting for longer stays in one place while another growing trend seems to be driving holidays where one night travellers might check in to a locanda (a charming little country inn or rooms above a restaurant), the next night opt for a farmstay or pensione, and then they'll do a hotel. People seem to be mixing it up a lot more. Then there's the increasing popularity of couchsurfing, a phenomenon The Guardian's Vicky Baker has been exploring in her series Going Local; Vicky has been sleeping on friendly sofas all over South America and loving it. The guidebook briefs we're getting are also reflecting changing trends, with less emphasis on hotels and hostels and more directives to source greater accommodation alternatives. So what do you think? Are hotels going out of fashion? I'd love to hear your thoughts - leave a comment or answer my poll (top right).
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While in Istanbul last week I picked up the May special 'Europe' issue of US Travel + Leisure with a feature on "Hidden European Neighbourhoods". The author writes: "Beyoglu is now reclaiming its status as Istanbul's favourite playground". Yet Beyoglu has always been Istanbul's commercial heart and its main pedestrianised street is the city's main shopping boulevard. Beyoglu is hardly "hidden" and it has always had a buzz about it, especially in the evening when it seems the whole of Turkey is out shopping, eating and drinking. The neighbourhoods that have experienced a renaissance in recent years are Tunel, Cukurcuma and Cihangir, considered the coolest by locals and the most interesting to explore for travellers with their cutting-edge boutiques, music stores, vintage clothes shops, antique stores, hip cafes and bars. Take a look at 'Istanbul, the Undiscovered Capital of Cool', which we published in April 2007. I'm in Rome this week, so it's amusing to read that Ponte, Parione and Regola are the eternal city's latest hot spots. These neighbourhoods are a hop, skip and a jump from Piazza Navona and their well-trodden cobblestone streets have always been the focus of tourist activity. While they're lovely, again, they're far from "hidden". Monti is much more fascinating, with its music school, funky boutiques, design stores, and laidback trattorias, while gritty San Lorenzo is the city's bohemian heart. But then the residents of Monti and San Lorenzo would probably argue their 'hoods have always been hip.
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Around five years ago the glossy travel mags started talking up Croatia as the next hot destination and travel journos were writing about the country as if it had only just been discovered. The Croatian National Tourism Board saturated the global media with their 'Mediterranean As It Once Was' campaign and everyone bought it. And bought tickets to Zagreb. We spent the summer there in 2003, travelling the length and breadth of the country. What we discovered was something very different to what was being marketed. Dubrovnik was one of the most divine cities we'd ever seen, the islands were beautiful, the myriad walled towns were atmospheric, and the nightlife was wild. However, Croatia was far from untouched. It was easily as crowded with tourists as Paris, Rome or Venice for that matter. Indeed, the Italians had been vacationing in Croatia for many years before it was 'discovered' by the English-speaking travel media. In 2005, Croatia had 10 million visitors. Still, in 2006 National Geographic Adventure magazine voted it destination of the year. It just goes to show that one person's latest, hottest destination is another person's old favorite. Nothing is new to anyone, it's just new again.
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That's the headline of a story in The Age yesterday written by former Lonely Planet writer Chris Taylor who recounts his discovery that the author who'd updated the China guide before him hadn't visited places himself, but had sub-contracted a cafe owner (who subsequently recruited his cousin!) to do the research instead. Taylor argues that due to increasing competition, guidebooks can't generate the sales revenues to justify the high fees required to ensure the kind of legwork and first-hand research that results in personal recommendations. That Lonely Planet's fees aren't high enough is true, but good writers will still do the legwork. So, is the guidebook dead? Kind of. But this isn't the first time it's been suggested: see The Death of the Guidebook? (The Observer/The Guardian, 2006) and Guidebooks: RIP (The Times, 2007). And I certainly don't believe the Internet killed the guidebook. There are travellers who still prefer discerning critical information written by experts who travel for a living over 'reviews' by people who take holidays once or twice a year. And there are still travellers who prefer carrying a guidebook to printing reams of paper off a website. I don't think all guidebooks will die, just the Lonely Planet style, and by that I mean the mainstream, one-size-fits-all continent and country guides, although I think LP is on the right track with the Encounter guides, as they were with their 'Best Ofs'. As anyone with any kind of marketing sense knows, rarely does one book (or film or CD for that matter) appeal to everyone, and the ones that do, like blockbuster movies or airport novels, tend to be bland, flawed and lack complexity and style. One guidebook can't be all things to all types of travellers, whether it's budget, mid-range or top-end, old or young, singles or couples. When they try to please everyone, they don't do very well at pleasing anyone. However, guidebooks have been taking a different direction for a while now. Consider the success of niche series Wallpaper, for travellers into architecture, art and design, and Luxe, focused at a style-conscious set. Aimed at a narrow target audience, they contain travel content created with their readership firmly in mind. The phenomenal success of Cool Camping, one of the UK's top-selling guidebooks last year, and the outpouring of emotion toward the enchanting hand-crafted Love travel guides are further evidence that travellers want more from their guidebooks. They want guidebooks produced for them. Well, don't we all? What do you think?Whenever I travel around the Middle East, I always find it interesting that tourists from the region don't use guidebooks. Admittedly, they're often pilgrims visiting sites of religious significance, such as these Iranian women in Damascus. But they still visit museums, go shopping, and eat out. They don't speak Arabic but somehow they manage, they find their way around, and they still seem to have a good time.
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A problem with the travel media, and the US media in particular, is their enthusiasm for publishing syndicated travel stories (they’re cheaper) and their preference for masking that the story was syndicated (everyone wants to publish original content, right?), which means the same story appears in a dozen or more different publications in different guises. I have no problem with syndication – my own stories have been syndicated – I just prefer that papers be honest about it. The Los Angeles Times glamping story Say, has the butler cleaned the trout yet? is Kimi Yoshino’s same Seattle Times story Glamorous camping: tent, butler, $595 a night which I quoted in my last post on the glamping trend. What’s even more disappointing in the travel media today is that there’s little analysis of or insight into the growth of travel trends generally. To use the glamping phenomenon again, aside from the trivialities, the most we learnt from the body of coverage was that the trend opened up exotic travel destinations to a traditionally uninterested demographic, as Courtney Weaver mentioned in Roughing it in Style in Business Week. Interestingly, one of the most insightful comments came from The Grinder, a food rather than a travel blog, which saw glamping as being symptomatic of a growing gap between America’s rich and everyone else. Now why couldn't a travel journalist have suggested that? I'm not after in-depth socio-economic analysis here but when a writer covers a new trend, such as glamping, wouldn't it be interesting to know the how's and why's as part of an introduction to the phenomenon rather than just read about the fact that one resort's comforters don't touch the floor and that you can plug in your hairdryer at another. Maybe I just expect too much from the travel press?
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We're all going on a glamping holiday - again, and again, and again
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Wednesday, April 9, 2008
As the cool camping phenom- enon was peaking in the UK last year, ‘glamping’ was starting to gain momentum in North America, where travel journalists admitted the trend had just recently traversed the Atlantic: “It’s known as “glamping,” or glamorous camping, a British import inspired by A-listers who wanted to be in touch with nature without touching the dirt and dishes,” the Seattle Times' CeCe Sullivan reported last May in Gather ’round the haute-grub campfire: “The tents are spacious; according to reports some are lined with antique saris and Persian carpets, and some feature fluffy down comforters tossed over mattresses that never touch the ground.” In case we'd forgotten, a few months later in the same paper Kimi Yoshino reminded us in Glamorous camping: tent, butler, $595 a night: “The number of visits to U.S. national parks is declining, but “glamping” — glamorous camping — is on the rise in North America after gaining popularity among wealthy travelers in Africa and England, where luxury tents come with Persian rugs and electricity to power blow dryers.” As one glamper tells us in that story: “It’s nature on a silver platter”. It’s a shame that level of quality and finesse didn't make it into the writing and that much of the glamping coverage dished out wasn’t worth dirtying a paper plate for - most publications ran with the same 'Ditch the smelly sleeping bag and go glamping' and ‘Where Wild Meets Refined’ angles, the same hackneyed ‘tick-off’ technique (“Gourmet chef – check. Wi-fi and laptops outside by the fire – check. $75 cigars, expensive liquor and wine – check”), and the same lack of creativity many of their UK counterparts applied to their ‘cool camping’ trend, with the same text used time and time again. Don't you hate that?naruto wallpaper 6:52 AM New Google SEO Bandung, Indonesia
Camping, camper- vanning and caravanning are so incredibly popular in the UK now and have such wide appeal they're even attracting aristocrats. That’s right! According to a January article in The Sunday Times: “A few years ago, the trend-watchers would have happily sent camping and caravanning holidays the way of the tinned pilchard and string vest,” (reporter Cally Law obviously slept through the cool camping craze and hasn't heard of Agyness Deyn, singlehandedly responsible for bringing the string vest back into fashion again), however, Law tells us the Camping and Caravanning Club membership has grown 44% in the past 10 years while the Caravan Club has experienced a 33% increase. The cause? The unpleasantness of air travel (surely an understatement after the recent Heathrow T5 debacle?) and a rediscovery of UK attractions: “Not that the kind of families used to the comfort and convenience which hotel living provides will have to rough it... Standards have been rising in response to a more demanding customer profile,” Law says, and as evidence: “At Ayr Holiday Park in St Ives, Cornwall, for example, the lavatory blocks have mosaic floors and piped music.” But of course they do! We already knew this - we read it in that April 2006 BBC story ‘Why the British Carry on Camping’ which I blogged about the other day: “The toilets at Ayr Holiday Park in St Ives, Cornwall, for example, have mosaic floors, heating and piped music.” Law goes on to enlighten us: we could “spend a whopping £250,000 on a motorhome - or get rolling in a caravan for just £10,000. Most modern tents are cheap, light, simple to erect and keep you snug all night long, whatever the weather.” (Huh?!) “Even the vocabulary is new,” she continues, “caravans are now tourers, static caravans are holiday homes and camp sites have become holiday and touring parks.” (Really?) Law informs us that: “Viscount Coke, 42, of Holkham Hall on the north Norfolk coast, is an enthusiastic caravanner." He's also owner of Pinewoods Holiday Park on his estate at Wells-next-the-Sea, a British Holiday & Home Parks Association (BH&HPA) member and Caravan Club president. Law writes: "When he was a child, he and his family used to spend all their holidays under canvas, and often visited his grandmother at her static caravan at Mother Ivey’s Bay in north Cornwall. “We had a whale of a time running about with the other children,” he says. “It’s classless, it’s safe, you are in a family park where lots of the owners know each other and it’s about location, location, location." It's all making sense now. Coke owns “550 holiday homes at Pinewoods, including 12 luxury wooden lodges overlooking Holkham National Nature Reserve”. I wonder if the Viscount issued that 2006 press release everyone seems to be quoting from? Is he the one we thank for getting us all back to nature? I have no problem with ‘posh camping’ although it's not as catchy as ‘cool camping’ – it’s lazy travel journalism I have the problem with. I do like the Viscount's 1965 22ft Airstream Safari. Nice.The luxury tent pictured is at Karijini Eco-Retreat in Karijini National Park, Western Australia.
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Exotically located movies and major sporting events get us moving, according to the Association of British Travel Agents which has announced its predictions as to where we'll be inspired to travel in 2008. The organization claims the Cartagena-set 'Love in the Time of Cholera' "promises to put Colombia back on the map of must see destinations", while 'Australia', starring Nicole Kidman, will see everyone heading down under; the British Museum's Terracotta Warriors' exhibition will whet our appetites for China, and the long-awaited summer Olympics will have us packing our bags; the world's first Formula One night race will lead us all to Singapore while Valencia's new Formula One street course will get us going to Spain. They add that early bookings for Turkey, Egypt, Portugal, the US, and France, indicate these countries will all be hot destinations for 2008. "Travelling is always an inspiring way of spending our free time," says ABTA head Justin Fleming. But are movies, museum exhibitions and sporting events alone enough to inspire us to move? And if travel in itself is inspiring, what does it inspire us to do?Today's image? A typical summer's day in Tiananem Square, something to look forward to at next year's Summer Olympics.
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Travel inspirations and travel trends: movies, museums and sports move us
Posted by BEST TRAVEL GUIDE on Thursday, December 20, 2007
I'm not sure if Sally Potter and her beautiful film The Tango Lesson were responsible or whether it's more indicative of a larger tendency in travel - to travel to learn - but the trend of foreigners travelling to Buenos Aires to take tango lessons is so extraordinary it constitutes a phenomenon. The dance has also enjoyed a revival among locals. Walk down any of San Telmo's streets in the early evening and glance through a door and you're guaranteed to see a traveller, young or old, in jeans and t-shirts, taking lessons from a dapper old gentleman in jacket and tie or a distinguished woman, her black hair pulled back into a ballerina's bun. There are tango schools all over the city and private lessons posted on notice boards at hostels and supermarkets. Hotels such as the wonderful Mansion Dandi Royal offer tango packages including lessons in their own tango salon. The most popular place to learn is in the splendid Confiteria Ideal, a faded old café with an atmospheric dance hall upstairs which operates classes day and night, followed by a milonga, or social dance, where you get to practice with the locals. You can read more about experiencing tango in our new book Buenos Aires Encounter, but what most fascinates me is the flourishing trend of experiential travel. Travellers want to educate their minds and stimulate their senses. Cooking courses in Tuscany. Arabic lessons in Damascus. Elephant trekking in Thailand. Wine-making in Napa. Travel choices increasingly seem to be as much about what to do as where to go. As the slogan of adventure and experiential tour operator iExplore says, people want to "come back different", while i-to-i, a site that offers volunteering experiences, teaching opportunities and community projects abroad, is all about "meaningful travel". I'm not so sure you need to do an organized activity or tour to fully experience a place. You can sign up for a course in something when you arrive. The important thing is to just go. Figure out what to do when you get there.
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