boomers
Lee’s Summit, Missouri, hopes to attract multi-generational visits featuring baby boomer grandparents. Photo from Lee’s Summit Visitors Council.
Lee’s Summit, Missouri — a city of about 90,000 people and part of the Kansas City greater metropolitan area — is targeting baby boomer travelers who are planning to take multi-generational trips in the near future, hoping to capture some of that growing market.
I’ve written a number of times about the growing baby boomer travel trend of multi-generational travel — going on trips with your kids and grandkids, often three generations at once — such as in this piece, which focuses on boomers traveling with their grandkids, and this piece, which identifies a multi-generational trend in taking river cruises.
Lee’s Summit’s tourism sector — the Visitors Council, Chamber of Commerce and some private travel-related businesses — did some research and found that one out of three “baby boomers… Continue reading
American Cruise Lines’ Queen of the Mississippi. Photo from American Cruise Lines
I’ve written several times previously about the hot European river cruising market (most recently here).
But the U.S. river cruising market is getting torrid as well, thanks in large part to American Cruise Lines, a family-owned company whose six small ships cruise rivers and waterways throughout America. Nearly three dozen itineraries range from the islands of New England to Alaska’s Inside Passage, the Intracoastal Waterway of the southeastern U.S. to the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, and many points between — including the mighty Mississippi.
Late last week I attended a luncheon in New York City with American Cruise Line executives aboard one of their ships, the Independence, a three-year-old vessel that holds a maximum of 104 passengers.
The Independence was temporarily docked at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan after completing… Continue reading
Mayor Bowers with his Spanish-speaking dog. Photo by Clark Norton
Most memorable travel moments revolve around people as well as sights and activities — often chance encounters on the road, sometimes fleeting, other times resulting in more long-lasting friendships.
Here are a few snapshots from my recent stay in and around Roanoke, Virginia, made possible by the Roanoke Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau, which sponsored me and a number of other travel writers and photographers so that we could get an overview of the area, dubbed “Virginia’s Blue Ridge.”
In Roanoke, some of my encounters were pre-planned, others serendipitous.
My fellow writers and I were privileged to meet the mayor of the city, David Bowers, who greeted us on an overlook atop Mill Mountain, below the city’s iconic 100-foot-high illuminated star. (Read more about the star here.)
The mayor brought his “Spanish-speaking dog,” who, while not actually… Continue reading
Although I didn’t grow up in the South and have only lived there a few years — in Florida and North Carolina back in the 1970s — I always think of Southern cooking when I think of comfort food.
Biscuits at the Roanoker Restaurant — fluffy yet filling. Photo by Clark Norton
My favorite comfort foods, at least to start the day, are biscuits and sausage gravy (toss in some grits and my bliss is complete). And so it was that I started every day of my recent stay in Roanoke, Virginia, with the very same biscuits and sausage gravy. I was powerless to resist — there they were on restaurant menus, prominently featured, and there they were at the breakfast bar at my Best Western hotel.
Are biscuits and sausage gravy the healthiest foods on the planet? Probably not. But how often am I in Roanoke, Virginia, which,… Continue reading
A pastoral scene near Roanoke, Virginia. Photo by Clark Norton
In my previous post, I talked about my trip last week to the Roanoke, Virginia, area, and what I regard are the smart marketing techniques of the Roanoke Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau by hosting travel writers and photographers from around the U.S. and Canada to experience an area they might otherwise not visit.
The trip was organized by the Florida-based public relations firm Geiger & Associates, who work out every activity down to the minute and somehow manage not to lose any writers — who rank right up there with cats in the “herding difficulty” scale — along the way.
Now I want to detail some things I learned about Roanoke and surroundings — well branded as “Virginia’s Blue Ridge” — that might be of interest to baby boomer travelers.
So in no particular order, here… Continue reading
Downtown Roanoke’s historic center is just the beginning of what the area has to offer visitors. Photo by Clark Norton
Last week I spent several days in and around Roanoke, Virginia, hosted by the Roanoke Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau. The bureau brought in 19 travel writers and photographers from around the U.S. and Canada to discover what the area had to offer and, ideally, to write about it.
This is smart marketing. Publications large and small in states and provinces as diverse as California and Massachusetts, Colorado and Connecticut, Alberta and Ontario will carry travel articles about the Roanoke region that otherwise would never appear (most of the writers had never been there before). Some of the journalists were baby boomers, others were younger or older, so they’ll chronicle the destination from a variety of perspectives.
The press trip was organized by Geiger and Associates, a Tallahassee, Florida-based… Continue reading
New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman: phony reviews will cost you.
In a previous post I discussed some of the good and bad aspects of TripAdvisor reviews, including possibly phony reviews that overexaggerate the positives or negatives of hotels, restaurants, and various travel activities, often to the point of ridiculousness.
Now New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is cracking down on some businesses that have been giving themselves five-star reviews on sites like Yelp, Google, CitySearch and Yahoo.
Nineteen companies — including a charter bus company as well as non-travel-related businesses — have been ordered to stop writing or contracting for phony reviews of themselves and to pay a total of $350,000 in fines.
Schneiderman estimates that by next year one seventh of all the reviews on social media sites will be fakes.
So-called “reputation enhancement” companies are at the heart of the problem, hiring cheap foreign labor… 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
The kitchen at the Cocomama hostel in Amsterdam. Photo from Cocomama.
Decades ago, when baby boomers were in their 20s and backpacking around Europe, many discovered the joys of staying in youth hostels. The main joy is that they were cheap — really cheap — but they were also good places to meet like-minded travelers, pick up some budget travel tips from them, and maybe even make some new friends in a foreign city.
There were drawbacks: some hostels wouldn’t allow access to your room for several hours during the day; the rooms most often sported dormitory-like accommodations, complete with bunk beds for up to a dozen people, making privacy nonexistent; the bathrooms and showers were invariably down the hall (though so were those in inexpensive European hotels and pensions back in the day); cleanliness was often in short supply; and there was always the possibility of getting your possessions… Continue reading
Visa stamps in passports are, thankfully, getting easier to obtain. Photo by Clark Norton
Traditionally, some of the most painful experiences in traveling internationally have taken place before the trips even begin.
No, I’m not talking about buying the plane tickets, though that can be painful as well. I’m not even talking about packing your bags to satisfy TSA requirements.
I am talking about obtaining visas, especially for certain countries that seem to do everything they can think of to discourage visitors from actually coming and spending money within their borders — just about as short-sighted a policy as you can get, since tourism is now the world’s number one industry.
And yes, the U.S. is one of those countries. I wrote about Brazil sparring with the U.S. over mutually restrictive visa requirements in an earlier post.
But now, things are loosening up a bit, according to a report… Continue reading
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