Just as autumn’s chill arrives, Hawaii is bringing plenty of sunshine and warmth to Canada. The Aloha Canada program touched down in Toronto on Wednesday (Oct. 23), with around 200 travel agents and travel lovers mingling and dining at the Toronto Congress Centre to hear updates on one of the world’s great destinations – and my personal favourite vacation spot on the planet. I’m all for that. I’ve been 25 times in this lucky life of mine, and some of my best memories are from trips to Lanai and Molokai, as well as to lesser-known areas on Maui, Oahu, Big Read more
Big Island
I had long been in love with Hawaii by the time it happened. But a routine chat at the public golf course at Waiehu, Maui in the mid 1970’s did a lot to boost my affection for these islands and its people. I was in high school at the time and was vacationing on Maui for perhaps the third time. My parents had let me invite a friend from my home town in California, and we had planned to play golf one of the fancy-schmancy Wailea courses, which I believe were pretty new at the time. We pulled into the Read more
The damage has been almost entirely to private homes, far from areas frequented by visitors. But the volcano that has pummelled the southeast corner of Hawaii Big Island has certainly had an impact on the state’s vital tourism industry, officials say. I chatted by phone on Friday with Ross Birch, head of Hawaii Big Island Tourism. He told me there’s no doubt that the uncertainty has hurt his island’s economy. He also agreed that a lot of the concern isn’t necessary. “Less than 10 square miles has been affected by the volcano,” he said. “The island is 4,028 square miles.” Read more
I was one very lucky guy in 2015, checking out magical places all around the world from Easter Island to the beaches of Lake Huron and tea plantations in The Azores. It takes a lot of work to travel this much, and there are a lot of people in the business who make it all happen for me; tourism boards and airlines and hotels and tour guides and more. So thank you to those folks. I’ve been compiling some of my favourite travel moments for year, and here’s another version of the annual Jimmys; awards for just about anything from 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
