Recently in Tourism Category

The Ullensvang Hotel in Lofthus, where we stayed last night, has seen a steep drop in British visitors recently. We used to be mixed in with Danish, Swedish, German and Japanese guests, but now we're barely represented at all.

Why? It's nothing to do with the hotel, which is perfectly good, with fine views out to Sor Fjord and a solid Grieg connection  - the composer was a friend of the founders, and his name is to be found in an old guestbook (in the middle of the pic).

Managing director Barbara Zanoni Utne tells us it's largely down to the closure of the Newcastle-Bergen ferry route. DFDS shut it down in September 2008, and operators who used it to get clients to Ullensvang pulled out.

At the same time, the independent travellers dried up, because they could no longer bring their cars over.

Perhaps this is an unfortunate metaphor, but in many places tourism operates in a delicate ecosystem..

Update: After leaving Ullensvang, we heard the same story all over Hardangerfjord, from hoteliers, museum guides, even staff on the hugely popular Flam-Myrdal railway.

They all, quite unprompted, pointed to the loss of Newcastle-Bergen.

It won't do to get too misty eyed - operators can't be expected to offer routes and destinations that are not bringing returns - but this is a magnificent part of the world, and is intimately related to British history. It would be a shame if the decline in British visitors became permanent.

More from my trip to Norway on Postcards...

I've been playing around with Google Insight this lunchtime after Travel Rants sounded off on the word 'staycation'.

Personally I defended it, but also started wondering what I could find out about who uses it.

I started in the States, and instantly struck confusion. The highest incidence of 'staycation' searches (proportionate to total regional search volume) occurs in not in trendy, buzzword-coining New York or California, but... Connecticut.

Que?

If we go by averages, Connecticut is not a state that is strapped for cash. In 2007 census figures it registered the third highest average household income in the US.

And sure, all that lovely New England scenery is a good incentive to holiday at home, but it's not the only scenic place in the US.

So what's going on? If anyone wants to turn internet detective on this, or simply sigh and point out something obvious I've missed, be my guest.

(NB: Here's a bonus screencap for the UK. A full 100% of our 'staycation' searches appear to originate in London... where the media is concentrated. Cough.)

Parts of Asia enjoyed a long total eclipse last night, and readers of the travel media may remember months and months of ads pushing the event - for specialists such as Wendy Wu, which registered chinaeclipse.com as a dedicated eclipse tours website, this was a nice selling point.

So when is the next bankable total eclipse? With ocean covering 70% of the Earth's surface, landfall can be scarce, and even when it happens isn't always in an attractive destination.

Here's a quick map and list. Locations and times are for places that will see the total eclipse, and the map is a sketch - click each line for a link to precise details from NASA.

View Total eclipses 2009 - 2019 in a larger map

2010: Southern Chile and Argentina, 2-3 minutes

2012: The tips of Queensland and the Northern Territory, 2-3 minutes

2015: Faroe Islands and Svalbard archipelago, 2-3 minutes

2016: Parts of Indonesia, 2-3 minutes

2017: Central US, 2-3 minutes (the only eclipse of 2009-2019 in which the point of Greatest Eclipse is on land - it falls in the south of Kentucky)

2019: Central Argentina, 2-3 minutes

So which ones do you think have most potential for attracting travellers from the UK? Australia, Indonesia and the US?

Homepage pic: Top Photo Group / Rex Features

As I normally do with new ads, I'll leave it largely up to you to comment on this one.

Personally I think it's fairly effective but not sure about 'find out what the British Embassy can do for you' as a call to action - knowing where to go for help is important, but I'd rather see the FCO encouraging travellers to inform themselves and behave properly.

Maybe that's just what I was expecting after reading the story on sex and nudity laws this morning).

I'm allergic to The Apprentice, but TW colleagues tell me last night's attempts to rebrand Margate varied from 'ok' to 'cringeworthy'.

The Guardian's Apprentice live blog agrees: an attempt to pitch Margate as a family destination was 'crap'  (it already is); an attempt to pitch it as a gay destination ('good idea') was let down by 'stupid posters'.

But it's all very topical. With Planet Recession in alignment with Good Weather and Weak Pound, we're expected to take more holidays in the UK this year, and attention is inevitably turning to seaside towns that were once the UK's tourism hotspots.

Just as inevitably, the attention comes in two broad forms: the nostalgic and the makeover...ic.

Shearings has gone for nostalgia: its new campaign is titled 'The Great British Summer', and the operator brought us some fish and chips when it came in to present it.

Visit Blackpool, by contrast, is trying to succeed where the Little Alans failed - and it has kicked off its makeover with an enjoyably tongue-in-cheek ad featuring an arty French girl who just loves the place.

If this seems improbable now (and it probably should) bear in mind that Blackpool has big plans for the future. Says the BBC:

A £220m regeneration scheme has just been given the go-ahead; sea defences, walkways and public areas are being refurbished and some accommodation in the town is being upgraded.

The major regeneration work is scheduled to begin in 2011, which is rather too late to catch current trends but nicely timed for the Olympics.

What price a British version of the oft-copied-never-bettered Best Job In The World campaign by the end of the year?

N.B. Thanks to Lee at Select World Travel's Destination Essentials blog, who gave me a ring to suggest a post about this.

I've read a couple of pieces that touch on this recently, so putting them into one post with a feature we ran late last year...

If you're seen any other good ones, drop them in the comments and I'll add to the post.

• Zimbabwe needs your tourist dollars [The Daily Traveler]
  "I've never felt so good about spending money as I did in Zimbabwe, and never come home wanting so much to send everyone I know to the place I just visited."
  
• Into the wild: a lifeline for the black rhinos of Zimbabwe [Times]
  "If Zimbabwe does achieve sanity and stability again, the first and most important step towards balance, foreign exchange and international acceptability will be through the tourist trade. Tourists come to Zimbabwe -- or they used to -- to see wildlife."

...and one from Travel Weekly...

• Zimbabwe: Is it time for the travel industry to return?
  "Two comments ring true. First, that refusing to visit hurts not Mugabe or his cronies, but the half a million people who used to be employed by the country's tourism industry. Secondly, that the real attraction of Zimbabwe is its people."

These are new films from VisitBritain, featuring residents of Newcastle, Whitby and Brighton - it's a new online campaign coinciding with British Tourism Week (our coverage here).

Any good?

It's the return of an occasional thingy where I throw you an idea or opinion from the weeks' travel news.

Your role is to come back with a short-and-sweet response - the titular Y or N. Justification is optional.

Here's PR Week editor Danny Rogers, a regular Travel Weekly columnist, on short haul destinations in the recession:

We'll inevitably see shorter breaks and lower spend ... For top destinations such as Spain, this creates a dilemma. Cut prices to compete more effectively, or position the product as more upmarket? The answer has to be a bit of both.

Ready? Go!

TW stablemate Caterer reports on Gordon Brown's speech at the national tourism summit in Liverpool:

Gordon Brown today urged the tourism industry to grasp the "huge opportunity" that globalisation will present over the coming decades

Inevitably, political rivals quickly pointed out that it isn't that easy, and that grabbing opportunities can cost money.

Don Foster, tourism spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said Brown's words were "hollow", pointing to the Government's decision to slash VisitBritain funding by nearly 20%

It's all very well to point out the irony of Brown's statement, but doing so only highlights the elephant in the room: the economic crisis prohibits VB's budget being beefed up again, and it prohibits it regardless of who is in power.

Perhaps it would be more productive to talk about making the money that is available count. That's a question of getting the creative right and leveraging new (and potentially very cost-effective) media.

I'm reminded of a funny encounter between Christopher Roderigues and BBC reporter Greg Woods on the Today programme some time ago.

As Woods implied then, if funding gets spent on sub-par push advertising there was arguably no point having it in the first place...

Tim Leffel points to a very-few-holds-barred assault on modern tourism in the Washington Post. A flavour:

Global tourism is ... nothing short of a planet-threatening plague. It's polluting land and sea, destroying wildlife and natural habitat and depleting energy and natural resources. Look-alike resorts and spas are replacing and undermining local culture...

But writer Elizabeth Becker does have some kind words, pointing approvingly to the National Trust's tourist rentals and 'community-based tourism' in Namibia.

Our writer Ian Taylor (who also blogs) visited a community tourism project in Thailand earlier this year, and came away impressed.

Anyway, Leffel widens Becker's piece into an indictment of travel journalism:

When is the last time you saw a destination exposed for the bad experience it really is in a major travel magazine? What's the ratio of positive cruising stories to the ones that examine the destruction caused by the industry and its passengers?

Some TW staff took part in a related discussion on the ethics of travel writing over on Adam Tinworth's One Man And His Blog recently (Adam is head of blogging at our publisher RBI).

Plenty to chew on here...