traveling baby boomers
Best Westerns hotels go green. Photo from Best Western.
Best Western — the world’s largest hotel chain with some 4,000 independently owned and operated properties in 100 countries and territories around the globe — is going green in a big way.
Every North American Best Western — representing more than 2,000 hotels — is required to have at least one green program in place, ranging from offering in-room recycling bins to installing low-flow shower heads and power-flush toilets to using green cleaning products and energy efficient appliances.
Some of its geothermal- and solar-powered hotels actually sell power back to the grid. Others participate in national or international eco-labeling programs. More than two-fifths of Canadian Best Westerns, for instance, have earned Green Keys from the Green Key Eco-rating program, presented by the Foundation for Environmental Education.
Best Western Supply, which offers materials for hotel construction, renovation and operations, features more… Continue reading
Boomers explore Angkor Wat with Classic Journeys. Copyright Classic Journeys.
At Classic Journeys — a company that specializes in walking tours with cultural components around the globe, as well as culinary and family trips — baby boomers are the prime target market.
In fact, according to Classic Journeys co-founder and president Edward Piegza, fully half their guests are aged 60 or older, and, he writes, “their thirst for adventure is alive and well.”
Classic Journeys attracts boomers for all the reasons I’ve been writing about in this blog:
* Itineraries span the globe from Morocco to New Zealand, Turkey to Cambodia, Corsica to Costa Rica, Argentina to Zambia — 33 countries on five continents — helping to slake boomers’ thirst for seeing parts of the world that are off the beaten track. (See my previous post on boomers’ taste for the exotic.)
* Classic Journeys walking trips are adventurous… Continue reading
Dog catching Frisbee invites Provincetown visitors to “Stay and Play.” Image from iPtown app.
Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod, has unveiled a free smartphone app that takes a whimsical approach to offering information to visitors — “befitting its image,” according to a press release announcing it.
Called iPtown, the app is produced by the town itself and promises the latest in digital technology. Visitors (or locals, for that matter), will be able to connect to businesses directly via phone, get directions “to anything in town a person could ever want to find,” as the release puts it, and generally locate things such as food and lodgings, shops, and special events as well as information like the weather and emergency services.
Known as an artists’ haven, Provincetown is playing off its reputation by featuring colorful images to direct users to different categories of information.
The “Stay and Play”… Continue reading
Hotel bathtub — luxury or menace for boomers?
One of my pet travel peeves for a while has been hotel bathrooms with high-walled bathtubs that are treacherous to climb into and out of — just to take a shower. The dangers of slipping on a wet surface — either within the tub or the bathroom floor after the shower — are always looming.
In fact, most hotel room accidents are related to bathtubs.
Yes, I admit it — I’m getting older and not as flexible as I once was. Which is true of many baby boomers — a huge number of whom are traveling these days. (The problems for seniors are even worse.)
And it all seems so unnecessary, if all one wants to do is take a shower. When I’m traveling, I seldom have time to take a bath, nor do I wish to. At home, I only take… Continue reading
Holland America ships carry knitting cruisers around the globe. Photo from Holland America.
Having written a column about theme cruises for Porthole Cruise Magazine for five years, I’ve covered everything from Goth cruises to ghost-hunting cruises, murder mystery cruises to psychic cruises, baseball legends cruises to pirate cruises (see my previous post on the latter) and many more.
For those unfamiliar with theme cruises, they involve like-minded groups of people going for a cruise together to spend usually a week or more pursuing a particular subject, including the topics above or others such as motorcycles, blues music, ukulele playing, ballroom dancing or soap operas. The may attend classes, talks, and practice sessions, take specialized shore excursions, and play trivia games and share meals with their fellow devotees. In some cases, they go scuba diving, play soccer at sea, or even run marathons.
The thing that’s struck me most about the… Continue reading
Leopard in tree — Botswana. Photo by Mark Lakin, Epic Road.
Combining luxury and adventure travel — two boomer favorites — with another boomer hot-button, “transformative experiences,” Epic Road offers customized trips that, for now at least, focus primarily on African safaris and the Arctic. Plans are in the works to expand into Asia, and Epic Road will work with clients to set up trips in other regions of the world if requested.
Luxurious adventure trips are offered by a number of other companies. The Epic Road twist is those “transformative experiences,” including specific humanitarian and conservation initiatives that travelers can build into their journeys if they choose. (See my previous post on tours popular with baby boomers that give back to the local communities they visit.)
Started by two longtime friends and devoted world travelers, Mark Lakin and Marc Chafiian, Epic Road’s declared ethos is “to raise… Continue reading
Uniworld’s River Queen on the Moselle River. Photo courtesy of Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection
Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection, whose trademarked slogan is “the world’s only authentic boutique cruise line,” is offering experiences that are right out of the baby boomer promotional playbook.
According to a recent press release, “enhancements for 2014 include delving even more into authentic and personalized travel experiences.”
“Authentic” and “personalized travel experiences,” please note, are exactly what baby boomers are looking for when they leave home.
The press release continues: “Uniworld’s onshore experiences will continue to focus more on flexibility with their ‘Choice is Yours’ options, along with more authentic and enriching experiences with more interaction with local communities, such as their ‘Do as the Locals’ and exclusive ‘Village Days’ offering the ultimate insiders’ experience.”
“Flexibility”…”Choice is Yours” options…”authentic” (again)…”enriching”…”interaction with local communities”…”Do as the Locals”…”insiders’ experience”…
All of the above are words and… Continue reading
The Woodstock Monument Memorializes the 1969 Festival. Photo courtesy of Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
Quick quiz: Where was the 1969 Woodstock Festival held?
If you said, “uh, Woodstock?” you’d be…wrong.
Due to various snafus, Woodstock — one of the seminal events of the baby boomer era, which brought many of the top musical performers of the day onto a rain-drenched stage before hundreds of thousands of mud-soaked, tie-dyed and oddly mellow spectators — was actually held in Bethel, New York, some 60 miles away from its original venue.
Bethel happens to be just 13 miles from where I now live.
Recently I took a friend over there to see the memorial monument at the site — now located on the grounds of the beautiful Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which itself has hosted the likes of Bob Dylan, Elton John and the Dave Matthews Band to… Continue reading
The S.S. Badger car ferry, still plying Lake Michigan as it did when I was a boy
This fascinating piece on nostalgia in today’s New York Times got me thinking about the role that nostalgia plays in the decisions we make about where and how we travel — especially as it relates to baby boomer travelers.
The Times piece points out that nostalgia was traditionally considered a “mental defect” of sorts, related to sorrow and depression. Recent studies have shown, though, that feelings of nostalgia for days, events and people gone by can actually brighten your mood and make you more optimistic for the future.
As someone who has a fair amount of nostalgia for places I’ve lived and traveled to in the past, I’m a big believer in the findings of those more recent studies.
Baby boomers (now 49 to 67) have reached the age when nostalgia tends to… Continue reading
Dubai’s Burj Al Arab — Often Voted the “World’s Most Luxurious Hotel”
When baby boomers travel, surveys show, they aren’t generally looking for familiar amenities – they’re looking for exotic (or at least different) foods, people and experiences that they can’t find at home.
In other words, the old “ugly American” stereotype of folks who will only eat hamburgers in France or who stare goggle-eyed at someone dressed a bit differently cannot be applied to most boomers. (Thank goodness.)
Furthermore, many baby boomers are sophisticated travelers who have journeyed abroad multiple times in their lives, both on vacation and on business. They long ago developed a taste for Thai food (very possibly in Thailand), have long since done the Eiffel Tower, Tower of London and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and can speak authoritatively on the relative merits of the Spanish Costa Brava and the French Riviera.
I don’t like… Continue reading
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