LUCKENBACH, TEXAS – Sometimes we travel writers research a destination too much. Then we get there and find it’s nice. But not as great as we had hoped. That wasn’t the case on my recent visit to Luckenbach, Texas. Hell, I didn’t know the place was a legend. I don’t have any Willie Nelson records, but I did buy a Waylon Jennings album long ago and I’m a big fan of Dwight Yoakam and cross-over country/rock artists like CCR and Linda Ronstadt. And I love the soothing soulful sound of a slide guitar. Still, I didn’t quite know what Luckenbach, Read more
Texas
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
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
LONDON – I don’t know this city as well as I’d like, but I found a great new spot in the eastern-central part of town. The Montcalm at Brewery City is a fun, polished and unique property near the Barbican and Moorgate tube stops. It’s in what functioned as the Whitbread Brewery for more than 200 years, and it’s got a lot of charm. You walk into the facility through a giant archway that once formed the entrance to the brewery, past iron gates with a polished gold sign. The lobby isn’t large but there are beautiful, fresh flowers (they’ve Read more
LONDON – It’s an impressive world in here. You can chat with a 10-foot-tall penguin from the Falkland Islands, relax in the first-class suite of an Emirates Airline A380 and pretend to sit behind the wheel of a tuk-tuk in Thailand. You also can get a massage in Indonesia, chat about trips to Montreal and get all weepy looking at giant posters of perfect, white sand beaches in Maui, Mauritius and the Maldives. The annual World Travel Market in London is a crazy, wild, impossible scene with tourism boards from around the globe meeting with buyers and journalists to nail Read more
