Cruise Travel, Once Thought Dead In The Water, Rebounds

by Chris Owen on

Cruise travel was riding high before the grounding of Costa Cruises ill-fated Costa Concordia last January. Multiple cruise lines had delivered a record number of ships, offering more travel options than ever before. But the tragic Concordia grounding caused first-time cruise passengers to re-think their travel plans as cruise lines redeployed ships to seemingly safer waters. Now, just months after the worst maritime disaster since the sinking of the Titanic, passengers are booking, cruise ships are filling up and new vessels are on order for what looks to be a bright future.

“The steady drumbeat of negative news emanating out of Europe is certainly having an impact,” Richard D. Fain, chairman and chief executive of Royal Caribbean International, said in a statement reported by the Los Angeles Times. “As a result, we are seeing pluses and minuses in the different geographic markets. North America is holding up reasonably well. Asia is a big plus but Europe is a pretty consistent minus.”

On the plus side, cruise lines have resumed going semi-full speed ahead with existing plans for new ships and have announced plans for more. Gadling recently reported the addition of Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Breakaway, a new ship themed for the New York market, complete with a hull design featuring the New York skyline and, as Godmothers of the new ship, the New York City Rockettes.Even Costa Cruises, who one might think would be taking a step back, is going forward by building the largest-ever, Italian-flagged cruise ship, the 132,500-ton Costa Diadema, said to be the future flagship of the line. The €550 million ship will carry 4,947 passengers, safely, due to a comprehensive industry-wide safety review that addressed issues brought up by the Costa Concordia event. Then they went further to add new safety precautions and standards.

Still concerned about sailing European waters? Viking River Cruises seem to be comfortable with the idea, announcing this week an order of 10 more Longships to launch in 2013, followed by eight more entering service in 2014. In an unprecedented growth spurt, Viking River Cruises will have introduced a total of 24 new ships in the last three years.

Still think cruise travel is for the ‘newly wed or nearly dead’? Think again. Today’s cruise travel experience, both on and off ships, is offering an entirely new array of choices, all based on the mantra that made cruise travel successful in the first place, the idea that ‘there is something for everyone.’

Rebounding cruise lines have a clear focus on destination-specific activities, leaving the idea of a tour bus shore excursion behind them. Azamara Club Cruises, Crystal Cruises and others plan intense off-ship experiences that result in destination immersion exclusive to travel via cruise ship. How about an adrenaline-filled flight in a fighter trainer jet as an expert pilot teaches combat aerobatics? You can do that on a cruise. A puppet show for the kids at the Villa Borghese in Rome? Yes, that too.

Cruise lines have squarely locked in to dazzling passengers with memorable, lifetime experiences ashore, offering more than ever before including overnight stays in port. On ships today, current and relevant on-board programming runs the gambit from learning and enrichment activities like training in an Apple Store at sea to destination-specific lectures from locals before visiting a port of call.

Sure, they still do have casinos, buffets, shuffleboard and other features on board that might turn off casual adventure travelers. But for the price paid, cruise travel is offering more than ever before, with some of the best travel values available. Visiting more unique ports around the world, some only accessible by cruise ship, cruise travel is steaming towards a bright future, with a more diverse manifest of passengers on board than ever before.


[Photo Credit- Flickr user Rick Collier]

Birth Of A Hotel: The Rise Of UltraLuxury

by McLean Robbins on



Above, Capella CEO Horst Schulze discusses the rise of the ultraluxury sector across the world on CNBC.

What is ultraluxury or ultra-luxury, you ask? The guest he describes is one who used to stay in a suite or on a club level of a Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons, and now opts for a smaller, more personalized guest experience.

What do they get? “Anything they want … so long as it’s legal, moral and ethical,” Shulze says.

Examples of ultraluxury include hotel brands like Rosewood, Aman and Ritz-Carlton reserve as well as some select boutique properties. These hotels are typically quite small, often less than 100 rooms, and many have rates starting at well over $1,000 per night.

Sign us up.

Food Trucks Gone Wild: A Video Tour Of LA’s Melrose Night

by Dave Seminara on


Care for a $5 ice cream sandwich made with fried chicken and waffle flavored ice cream and a gluten-free coconut almond cookie? Or how about some Hawaiian breakfast sliders, made with Portuguese sausage, sautéed onions, and Shoyu scrambled eggs on Hawaiian bread? Those of are just a couple of the tantalizing selections I noticed when I stumbled across Melrose Night in Los Angeles last Thursday night.

On the first Thursday of each month, more than a dozen food trucks and an assortment of shops set up on Melrose Avenue between Ogden and Curson between 6-10 p.m. The event began in January 2011, and the crowds and vendor list continues to grow. I counted 15 food trucks at Melrose Night last week and almost every one of them had something I wanted to eat.There was gelato on a stick ($4) at Cool Cow Feel Good, Frito pies ($6) and chicken and waffles ($8) at the Trailer Park Truck, red velvet chocolate chip pancakes ($6), lobster rolls ($12) and a host of other goodies. One truck was even selling flatiron steaks at $15 a pop.


I love the gourmet food truck trend, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to order a steak or fried chicken and stand on the street eating it. I will order tacos, ice cream, lobster rolls, burgers, basically anything that doesn’t require a knife and fork, but I really don’t want to be eating pancakes, omelets, steaks and the like on the street.

My other issue with some gourmet food trucks is the high prices. Some are offering very good values. We had a rocky road ice cream sandwich that I thought was pricey at $5 until I realized the thing was big enough to feed my family of four!


But others are pricing their menu items as though they were restaurants. There is a difference between standing on a street corner eating something and being able to sit down at a restaurant, be it fast food or sit down. I do expect a discount at a food truck, but I think a few food truck proprietors are getting a bit high and mighty.

I know that they need permits and have overhead as well, but their fixed costs are lower than restaurants, so I don’t expect to pay $11 for a veggie burger and fries at a food truck when that is roughly the same price I’d pay in a restaurant.

Those minor beefs aside, I highly recommend checking out Melrose Night. Show up hungry and you will definitely eat well. It’s also a great area for window-shopping and people watching. L.A. isn’t much of a pedestrian city, but this is one of the few opportunities to walk around on sidewalks that are full of people and life. You might not save a ton of money by dining on the street, but you’ll eat well and have a blast.

Faces Of Afghanistan: Why A Personal Connection Is The Most Important Part Of Travel

by Anna Brones on

“The people are sweet, the country’s a mess.”

I had asked an NGO worker with a teaching and military background about his perspective of Afghanistan.

It’s always hard to sum up a place in a sentence, be it Australia or Afghanistan, but this one kind of said it all, in a particularly heartbreaking way.

Read a newspaper article and you get to know a place. Have an exchange with an individual in that place and you get to know a person. It is a lot easier to make assumptions about a place when we don’t have that personal connection. I am reminded of the Dagobert D. Runes quote, “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”

Ignoring is the easy route, facilitated by our illusion of being informed. In the day and age of the Internet and television we can know a lot about the rest of world, without ever leaving our homes, but how many of us stop to question how much we really know about the places that we read or hear about? If we do in fact “know” a place, do we take the time to do anything about it?

We travel because it’s the alternative to taking the easy route. It forces us to be compassionate. To make the kind of connections that are about more than what we have read about or heard on the news.

Numbers and statistics turn to an individual interaction. A person. A brother. A sister. A mother. A husband. A personal connection puts a face to a place, and in the process changes our perspective and attachment to that place.

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In Afghanistan, as I was offered cups of tea from strangers, taught words in Dari and asked about my own perspectives of the country, it was clear that for me this place of conflict was shifting from a far off war zone to a collection of faces and personalities. Before, when someone said the word “Afghanistan” my mind immediately went to suicide bombers and AK 47s. Now it goes to a handshake, a necklace given as a parting present, brunch in someone’s home overlooking a garden, an email asking if I am keeping up on my Dari.

We need policy and diplomats and humanitarian organizations to build a platform for positive change in this world. But we also need personal interactions – the kind that shape how we look at and understand a place.

At the end of October, Anna Brones spent two weeks in Afghanistan with nonprofit Mountain2Mountain working to produce several Streets of Afghanistan public photo exhibits. This series chronicles the work on that trip and what it’s like to travel in Afghanistan. Follow along here.

[Photo Credits: Anna Brones]

The Kimchi-ite: The Culture Shock Of South Korea

by Jonathan Kramer on

When I moved to South Korea, it was my first time in the country and I had no idea what to expect. Going from the airport to my new apartment, differences from my prior life slowly came into focus. Signs were now written in lines and circles I didn’t understand, brand new glass skyscrapers were poised next to traditional tile-roofed houses and all the cars were made by Hyundai. As I walked around my new neighborhood at 4 a.m. on a Wednesday recovering from jet lag, I was expecting to be alone on the streets. Instead, when I walked around there were plenty of people out in the city, eating and drinking at cafes, going to work, doing their shopping or just stumbling out of bars. This constant, 24-hour activity is something I haven’t seen anywhere else. As the sun came up, more and more people came to the streets. Crowds seemed to form everywhere and I would quickly learn that they are a big part of Korean life.

South Korea is a little larger than the state of Indiana but with eight times the people. About half of South Korea’s 50 million people live in the greater Seoul area, making it one of the biggest, most populated cities in the world. Subway cars overflow as people push their way in, which is when I learned that the Korean words for “excuse me” and “I’m sorry” are almost never spoken. Even when trying to get out of the city to do some hiking, crowds of thousands will be there too.

When moving to a foreign place, there are so many moments that you feel completely lost and worry that it will become overwhelming. Am I going to accidentally offend anyone due to our culture differences? Will I be able to make new friends? What if I get sick of eating kimchi everyday and just want some food from back home?

Soon, however, everything starts to feel normal and you realize that life isn’t really all that different. You still do laundry, McDonald’s is always around the corner and cash comes out of ATMs. There are still minor differences in daily life – you have to spend an hour online trying to find a translation of your washing machine, McDonald’s offers free delivery and you can transfer money directly to a friend’s bank account from an ATM – but it becomes difficult to imagine a life without these idiosyncrasies.

This constant flux of familiarity and strangeness is part of what makes life as an expatriate so exciting. Constantly experiencing new aspects of cultures, learning about different trains of thought, meeting interesting people, eating food that looks make believe and just constantly being surprised by the world.

[Photo credit: Jonathan Kramer]