Travel Blog
The Future of Travel: Travel + Leisure’s 35 Innovators
by Michael Yessis | 04.04.06 | 1:03 PM ET
Bless you Joe Ferry and your quest for better airline seats. Thank You Hermann Freidanck for trying to make airline food edible. And good luck Creenagh Lodge with your efforts to brand destinations, which, as we’ve seen, can be a minefield. These are three of Travel + Leisure’s 35 travel innovators, featured in the magazine’s April issue to commemorate its 35th anniversary. It’s a compelling, comprehensive look at the future of travel. It’ll be interesting to see how many of these innovators’ ideas take hold.
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Yahoo! BuzzWriting Gig of the Month: Rolling Stone Meets MTV
by Jim Benning | 04.03.06 | 6:21 PM ET
It’s not travel writing, but it’s too good to pass up mentioning. From JournalismJobs.com: “Rolling Stone is looking for aspiring amateur journalists to compete for a one-year staff position with the magazine—while MTV tapes the competition for a new reality series. Working with the magazine’s top editors, competitors will hone their writing skills and secure interviews with major musicians, actors, and politicians.” Rolling Stone has more details. You can imagine the pitch meeting for this: “It’s ‘The Real World’ meets ‘The Apprentice’ meets Cameron Crowe’s ‘Almost Famous’!” When is National Geographic Traveler going to team up with the National Geographic Channel for a travel-writing version? Better yet, MTV: Have your people call our people. World Hum needs a plucky intern. We can put the candidates through the travel editorial paces. They can brood and squabble and battle their addictions and endure flying coach in front of the cameras. It’ll be great TV.
Thomas Swick Discovers Paradise
by Jim Benning | 04.03.06 | 6:10 PM ET
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor recently visited the Cook Islands. He stayed at the Paradise Inn. He lathered himself in sunblock. He perspired. He snorkeled. And as he writes in Sunday’s paper, he had a realization about paradise.
Arizona’s Monument Valley: A Stranger to Americans, Loved by Europeans
by Michael Yessis | 04.03.06 | 12:01 PM ET
Timothy Egan visited the iconic American landscape of Arizona’s Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park—if you’ve watched a John Wayne movie, you’ve probably seen it—and, strangely, didn’t see many other Americans. “Monument Valley is full of Europeans, busloads from Italy and Germany and France, trying to experience our Eiffel Tower, our Colosseum,” Egan writes in an excellent piece in Sunday’s New York Times. “They take pictures of themselves on horseback, posed in front of a mesa that looks to be half the size of St. Peter’s Basilica. But where are the Americans?” Egan immerses himself in the Valley, and finds that as the “lone Yank” visiting John Ford Point, one of the spectacular vistas in the park, he never felt more American.
British Secondary Schools Add Michael Palin’s “Himalaya” to Required Reading List
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.06 | 1:54 PM ET
It’s part of an effort to bring students up to speed on their geography studies, the worst taught subject in British schools, according to the country’s Office for Standards in Education. “You can travel the seas, poles, and deserts and see nothing. To really understand the world you need to get under the skin of people and places. In other words, learn about geography,” said Michael Palin, a member of Monty Python and a well-traveled author, according to a report in the Mirror. “I can’t imagine a more relevant subject. We’d all be lost without it.” In Himalaya, Palin chronicles a six-month trek through India, Pakistan and China.
South Florida: Home of the Major Cruise Ship Lines and the Lawyers Who Love Them
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.06 | 12:00 PM ET
The Miami Herald published a fascinating package of stories last week about attorneys who specialize in representing cruise ship passengers and crew members. According to the Herald’s Amy Martinez, about 15 South Florida lawyers have created a thriving cottage industry by suing the big cruise lines.
Upper Yangtze Ecoregion, China
by Ben Keene | 03.31.06 | 11:00 AM ET
Area: 280,696 sq. mi. (727,000 sq. km)
Provinces included: 12
Although North American in origin, the proverb “after the feast comes the reckoning” can be applied to a predicament facing modern China. With 1.3 billion citizens using chopsticks, an eating utensil that dates back more than 3,000 years and that’s usually made of wood, the country was watching its forests disappear at an alarming rate. Taking a step toward conservation, the Chinese government has responded by applying a 5 percent tax, beginning in April, on the tens of billions of these ubiquitous disposable implements that are produced annually from birch and poplar trees. Much of China’s commercial logging occurs in the southwestern area of China known as the Upper Yangtze Ecoregion. The region supports a diverse range of flora and fauna, including the giant panda.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
Which City Has the Worst Drivers?
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.06 | 1:45 AM ET
Is it Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Kuwait City? Rome? Los Angeles? London Times correspondent Chris Ayres devotes his latest So L.A. blog entry to his opinion on the subject. “[T]his week I returned from Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city whose entire population seems to be trying to break the land speed record in a 1984 Renault 9 GLS,” he writes. “And I concluded that the lapses of concentration demonstrated by motorists in Los Angeles is far preferable to the sociopathic stare of the average Porteno cab driver, who considers it his duty to accelerate towards stationary objects (including human beings) at double the speed limit, before averting multiple homicide by stomping on the brakes or swerving violently.” Sounds horrible, but I’m going the other way on this. I’ve seen some dreadful drivers here in Los Angeles. Just tonight, for instance, I was traveling a busy two-lane street when the guy in front of me swerved into the oncoming lane and stopped cold, just to drop off his passengers. No hazards. No signal. No brain.
Rolling Stone Magazine Banned in China
by Jim Benning | 03.30.06 | 4:51 PM ET
The magazine had just launched its China edition with a splashy billboard advertising campaign. The Los Angeles Times has the details.
Smell This! Westin’s Unique Ad Campaign.
by Jim Benning | 03.30.06 | 12:28 PM ET
My wife, Leslie, has a game she likes to play. Every once in a while, she dabs on some lotion from one of the hotels where we’ve stayed in recent years, rubs it into her hands and holds them up to my nose. “Where’s this from?” she demands with a grin. I take a whiff. My olfactory glands spring into action. Messages are relayed from my nose to my brain, and I find myself saying something like, “Maui. Definitely that place on Maui.” Or: “Is that from the hotel in Guadalajara?” More often than not, to my surprise, I’m right. The nose knows. Westin Hotels & Resorts must know this, too.
Celebrity Travel Watch: President Bush in Cancun*
by Theodore Fez | 03.30.06 | 9:35 AM ET
I know what you’re thinking: Yawn! President Bush is no celebrity, and this is not the Real Cancun! Has Theodore Fez lost his marbles? The answer is…no way! I’m a fashion hound, and what I saw in the press photos from the big honchos’ Cancun meeting today made me feel both shock and awe!
Into the Heart of Sisu in Finland
by Jim Benning | 03.29.06 | 11:06 PM ET
Bill Thomas visited Finland in January and, in the painfully chilly conditions, discovered the secret to surviving a brutal Finnish winter: sisu. “In the five years since my last visit I’d almost forgotten about sisu, a Finnish word for something that’s hard to translate,” he writes in a delightful story in Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine. “The equivalent in English might be ‘determination.’ Sisu, however, implies a trait much deeper in the Finnish character, so deep, in fact, that it’s best observed in the dead of winter, when added reserves are needed just to make it from one five-hour day to the next.”
For Sale: Used Hotel Furnishings
by Michael Yessis | 03.29.06 | 1:53 PM ET
USA Today’s Roger Yu reports that the market for used hotel furniture is hot. As hotels upgrade their amenities, liquidators are buying up the old TVs, desks and other furniture and selling the items to the public. Yu writes that deals abound: a 27-inch color TV for $60, an eight-drawer armoire for $299, a TV credenza for $450. He’s also put together a list of hotel liquidators with showrooms around the country.
Las Letras: Madrid’s Literary Quarter Copes With a “Trendy Onslaught”
by Michael Yessis | 03.29.06 | 4:44 AM ET
J.R. Moehringer: A Day at Sinatra’s House
by Michael Yessis | 03.28.06 | 2:27 PM ET
