Luxury travel
Hapag-Lloyd’s Europa 2 is one luxurious way to cruise Europe. Photo by Clark Norton
After posting my recent piece on repositioning cruises, I received this guest post entry from reader Suzanne Meades, offering some reasons why baby boomers might prefer taking a cruise ship to flying to and around Europe.
And for those boomers who have the time, I couldn’t agree more.
Both ocean and river cruising are big with boomers. A transatlantic cruise — fairly rare these days, except for repositioning cruises — evokes particular nostalgia for me, since a Spanish steamship took me across the Atlantic on my first trip to Europe in college. I even have a medal for winning the shipboard table tennis tournament, no easy task since the ship was rocking and rolling through the waves during my final match. At least, I think that medal is hiding around here somewhere…
As for seeing… Continue reading
Exterior of St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague. Photo by Clark Norton
When it comes to visiting European cities, I love old.
And you’ve got to love a city where the “New Town” section dates from the 14th century.
And where a section called “Lesser Town” has more going for it than many other cities can boast in total.
Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, dates from the ninth century with the construction of Prague Castle, which is now the largest occupied castle in the world — covering 16 acres, it’s actually more like a palace — and houses the offices of the Czech president as well as the country’s crown jewels.
The castle was once the seat of power of the vast Holy Roman Empire, which ruled central Europe for a thousand years.
While some of the most beautiful parts of the castle are open only to the president,… Continue reading
The JW Marriott Miami, one of 63 current representatives of the brand. Photo from JW Marriott Miami.
Like every other business these days, it seems, the hotel business is all about branding — the art of distinguishing your hotels from those of other brands.
Every lodging chain from Motel 6 to W Hotels has a brand, and a target customer they believe will respond to that brand. Motel 6 appeals to budget road travelers who apparently arrive late at night. W Hotels appeal to affluent younger arty types, who don’t mind paying big bucks for cool but cramped quarters. Not many Motel 6’ers are going to stay in W’s, and not many W aficionados are going to bed down at Motel 6, no matter how late they leave the light on for ya.
As JW Marriott’s global brand manager Mitzi Gaskins told the travel trade site Skift.com in a recent… Continue reading
New Mexico’s Spaceport America, where Virgin Galactic hopes to launch the first commercial space flights. Photo from Virgin Galactic.
Fortune has come out with an interesting follow-up story to our previous post about Sir Richard Branson’s out-of-this-world venture Virgin Galactic, which aims to bring space tourism to America.
Some 600 affluent travelers — including plenty of intrepid baby boomers — have plunked down up to $250,000 each to be among the first passengers on a commercial flight into space, which could happen as early as 2014, though previous target dates have come and gone. With six passengers scheduled for each flight, that would already amount to 100 sold-out flights.
According to Fortune, one travel agency — Virtuoso — has landed exclusive rights to book passengers throughout the Americas onto the flights.
Virtuoso — which bills itself as “the travel industry’s leading luxury network” — includes more than 330 agencies… Continue reading
Multi-generational travel is a popular offering from Road Scholar tours; boomers and millennials together in Costa Rica. Photo from Road Scholar.
Much like U.S. baby boomers, Canadian boomers have largely put their backpacking days in the rear-view mirror, seeking instead to pursue luxury and explore history, art, culture and warm beaches when they travel.
According to a Travelocity.ca survey of 1,004 randomly selected Canadians of two different generations (boomers and millennials), 89 percent of the boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) surveyed said they planned to travel just as much or more in 2014 than they did in 2013.
And 47 percent of them — spread just about equally between men and women — rate luxury travel as very important in their planning.
Twenty seven percent of the boomers surveyed listed exploring history, art and culture as their top priority, the most of any category. Just under a quarter of… Continue reading
A Chianti vineyard in Tuscany is included on the Gold Standard tour of Italy offered at Zicasso. Photo from Zicasso.
Zicasso — an online service that matches travel agent specialists with luxury travelers to plan memorable customized trips around the globe — is touting five specially planned trips on five different continents to mark its fifth anniversary in business.
The five tours promise experiences and access beyond the ordinary. They include the “Gold Standard Culinary and Art Tour of Italy,” the “Ultra Luxury South African Safari,” the “Australian Family Adventure,” the “Insider’s Guide to Brazil,” and “Off the Beaten Path China.”
Along with the tours, Zicasso is offering an intriguing promotion: the first five travelers to book all five tours by the end of 2013 will receive free roundtrip airfare to all five. The airfare is in coach class and must be used by 2015.
Of course,… Continue reading
Jacada Travel will help you get close up to a zebra on a luxury African safari.
I wasn’t too familiar with Jacada Travel, a London, England-based company that specializes in luxury private guided tours in Latin America and Africa, but a new Gold Award from Travel Weekly in their 2013 Magellan Awards made me take notice.
Jacada Travel was named a “Best Overall” tour operator by a panel of travel industry leaders and insiders.
The company is just five years old and promises to deliver personalized travel experiences, which they’ll design for you based on your wants, needs, desires, and, no doubt, a few whims.
If cost is no object — or at least not the defining object — in your pursuit of bucket list safaris in Africa or Amazon tribal encounters in Peru, Jacada Travel will make it happen.
Baby boomers (as well as other travelers such as… Continue reading
One of the big developments in cruising in the past few years is the rapid rise of river cruising, which has a big marketing advantage over ocean cruising among a certain segment of the population: namely, those who don’t like the idea of being out in the ocean on a big ship.
Emerald Waterways features an innovative “indoor balcony” in some cabins. Photo from Emerald Waterways.
Whether it’s fear of open water, fear of getting seasick, fear of overcrowding, or fear of being on a big ship if a crisis strikes at sea — such as some of the highly publicized events of the past year or two — a number of people just won’t consider taking a traditional ocean cruise. (No matter how much I or many other cruising advocates try to convince them otherwise.)
River cruising, on the other hand, enables you to stay close to land on… Continue reading
What boomers want most when they travel?
I haven’t seen the full study, but the online market research firm Lab42 has released this tantalizing tidbit from a recent survey of 500 “social savvy” baby boomers — that is, who use social media — who plan to take a vacation in 2013:
Forty one percent of those surveyed said they were willing to spend more money to “stay more comfortably” in their lodgings at the expense of other aspects of the trip — presumably things like restaurants, transportation, sightseeing and other activities.
This compares to just one-quarter of those surveyed who said they would spend less on accommodations in order to spend more on other aspects of the trip, and a third who said they gave no consideration to the cost of overnight accommodations.
If I ran a luxury resort or hotel, this would have to be good news.
First, I… Continue reading
The MS Europa 2. Photo from Hapag-LLoyd.
I’m onboard the Europa 2, Hapag-Lloyd’s new luxury cruise ship, sailing from Sicily to Sardinia in the western Mediterranean.
One of the afternoon offerings onboard is a meat seminar featuring Wolfgang Otto, one of three German brothers who recognized a need in Germany and decided to fill it: supplying Germany’s finest Michelin-rated restaurants with top-quality beef and pork.
Otto admitted to me and the other baby boomers onboard that just eight years ago he knew very little about meat, yet today his family’s company, Otto Gourmet, is regarded as the top beef and pork purveyor in Germany. Kobe cattle and Iberico pig are two of the products they distribute to both top restaurants and private customers.
For enlightenment on the subject, he and his brothers first turned to a Nebraska rancher, Dan Morgan, who taught them the finer points of how to… Continue reading
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