Looking for a travel deal this summer? Look south. And way, way east. But not to the west coast of the U.S. A useful study from the folks at Trip Advisor finds that a three-day visit for two people to any of several great cities in the U.S. south is your best financial bet. If you’re looking overseas, you’re better off to consider the Far East. If you’ve got money to burn, on the other hand, try Seattle, Cancun or Zurich. The Trip Advisor study looked at the price of a four-star hotel (personally I’d study 3-star hotels if I Read more
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I wrote this blog for the Toronto Star last year after a nice visit to Buffalo. From what I hear, things have improved even more since I was last in town… BUFFALO, NEW YORK – Mea Culpa. For years, as I recall, the head of media/public relations for Buffalo Tourism had been bugging me to come on down and check things out. I envisioned cool architecture and chicken wings and a nice Frank Lloyd Wright building Ihad heard about. I covered the Buffalo Bills off and on for the Star’s sports section in the early 2000’s, but I didn’t have Read more
David Whitaker was hired in May of this year as chief marketing officer for Brand USA, which was set up in 2010 to market the U.S. to the world. He served as head of Tourism Toronto from 2007 until taking the Brand USA job. Prior to his Toronto job the Georgia native spent 17 years with the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. I sat down with him this week in Orlando at IPW, the massive, annual U.S. tourism session that attracts thousands of travel, trade and media types to talk business and book U.S. travel. Whitaker was in constant Read more
I got news of a remarkable study the other day from Resonance Consultancy, which did a report on 121 U.S. cities and ranked them according to their “experiential quality.” It strikes me as a bit of an inexact science, but the idea behind the study is a very good one that involved analyzing consumer comments on various websites to determine not just actual numbers of who goes where but the level of engagement and happiness people feel when they go to a destination. In a press release they sent, Resonance officials said industry folks know about visitor county,, spending and Read more
With the stroke of a pen, or, rather, with the stroke of a bunch of ballot votes in favour of legalizing gay marriage, Ireland has suddenly jumped into the thick of the worldwide travel conversation. Not only does the country look good by most of the world’s standards in terms of embracing different cultures, it stands to benefit greatly from a tourism standpoint. I don’t know how large the LGBT tourism business is worldwide, but if guesstimates are right that 10 per cent of the world counts itself as gay or transgendered or what have you, then it’s big. Very Read more
