Gadling’s favorite hotels for 2011

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Where do your loyal well-traveled Gadling contributors especially love to spend the night? We polled Gadling writers on their favorite hotels in 2010. Think of Gadling’s favorite hotels for 2011 as our version of a hotel tip sheet.

Laurel Miller. The Kirketon in Sydney for its quirkiness, cool bar, small size, helpful staff and retro-mod style, blissfully free of big-city attitude. Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island, South Australia as a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence in a staggeringly beautiful, intimate setting hovering over a private beach covered with wallaby tracks. For high-end luxury, Ecuador’s Hacienda Zuleta. It’s historic, in the foothills of Andes in northern Ecuador, a working dairy/horse farm/creamery/condor preserve. It offers an intensely Ecuadorean experience, from the local indigenous culture to hospitality, geography, and food that is worth the trek. And lastly theWit in Chicago with its ideal location on the Loop, across the street from the river.

Mike Barish. The Wort Hotel in Jackson, Wyoming. Located right in the heart of Jackson, a historic hotel steeped in cowboy tradition. Grab a drink at the hotel’s Silver Dollar Bar after a day exploring Grand Teton National Park.

Grant Martin. Favorite hotel of the year was the Elysian, right in downtown Chicago. Beautiful, huge rooms, clean, elegant and sharp appointments, razor-sharp staff and a perfect location make this the best spot to spend a long weekend in the Loop.

Annie Scott. The Capella Hotel in Singapore remains a favorite, as does the Hotel Imperial in Vienna. I’m a sucker for luxury. I also loved staying at Sanctuary Sussi & Chuma, a treehouse hotel in Zambia, despite a harrowing adventure with a giant bug which I eventually captured with a teacup and saucer.

McLean Robbins. CastaDiva Resort, Lake Como. Opened in June, this is the first five-star resort to open on the lake in about 100 years. It’s stunning and unique. Used to be a private home to the muse of Bellini, sat empty for decades before being gutted and re-done. Top-notch service, food and spa.

Don George. This year’s hotel highlights were the following trio in Peru. All combined great style and comfort with a deep sense of immersion in the local place, through their architecture, cuisine, artful decorations, and programs that featured local people to promote local sights and attractions. In Urubamba: Sol & Luna. In Aguas Calientes: Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel. In Cusco: Inkaterra La Casona.Tom Johansmeyer: My favorite hotel will always be On the Ave, on W 77th Street, between Amsterdam Ave and Broadway in Manhattan. I once lived there for a few months, and while doing so, I fell in love with the Upper West Side, ultimately moving into the neighborhood. Since my stay in 2004 the rooms have been renovated, but the sixteenth-floor terrace remains. On your next trip to the city, skip the big names, and head up to my neighborhood: it’s worth it to stay a bit out of the way.

Melanie Nayer. Sticking with the Shanghai theme (see yesterday’s favorite destinations post) my favorite hotel this year is the Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong.

Karen Walrond. I’m a big fan of the boutique hotel. Recently I stayed at Hotel Lucia in Portland and was blown away by the customer service, and it’s not too expensive. In my homeland of Trinidad, I love the Coblenz Inn, an upscale little boutique place. I also love Acajou, an upscale-yet-very-rustic eco lodge in Grand Riviere, Trinidad. Lovely.

David Farley. The Royal Park Hotel in Tokyo. If you can, get upgraded. Upgrades mean an early-evening cocktail hour with complimentary drinks and snacks every evening.

Kraig Becker. The Chico Hot Spring Resort located in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park in the beautiful Absaroka Mountains. Rooms start as low as $49/night and range up to $300/night for luxurious cabins with some of the most spectacular views around. After a gourmet meal in the Chico dining room, guests can soak in the pool, which is drained and refilled each night with water from the local hot springs.

Catherine Bodry. Songtsam hotels in China

Alex Robertson Textor. Buenos Aires cE Hotel de Diseño. I loved the hotel’s location and thorough minimalism (concrete walls and floors) as well as the ample room size and delicious breakfast. The rate, which I found through Tablet Hotels, was also very reasonable, at $109 including taxes.

[Image: Flickr | doug_wertman]

Gadling’s favorite destinations for 2011

by Alex Robertson Textor on

We travel a lot, to destinations both well-known and unfamiliar. In our defense, it is our job to travel like mad, to explore the world and then write about our discoveries.

Though most travel writers find something or other of interest in most places we visit, there are always those personal favorites that rise above the rest. This year, we decided to scribble our favorites down for you. Some of these spots we’re tipping for greater coverage in 2011, while others are simply tried-and-true favorites that we can’t stop raving about to our friends and the various publications that allow us to write for them. Over the course of this week, we’ll weigh in on our favorite hotels, airlines, gadgets, apps, and websites.

So, without further ado: Gadling’s favorite destinations for 2011.

Mike Barish. St. Kitts. I genuinely enjoy how locals and visitors frequent the same beach bars and restaurants. During evenings on the strip, I’d recognize staff members from my hotel doing the same thing I was doing: enjoying the ocean breeze with a cocktail and some jerk chicken.

Kraig Becker. Everest Base Camp, Nepal. For adventure travelers, a visit to Everest Base Camp is one of the best treks in the world. The 12-day hike isn’t just about the destination, however, as you walk in the shadow of the Himalaya each day, passing through sleepy mountain villages steeped in Sherpa culture along the way. The scenery, and altitude, is a breathtaking once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Catherine Bodry: Ko Chang, Thailand and Sayulita, Mexico.

Joel Bullock: My favorite new roller coaster of 2010 is Carowinds’ Intimidator. Carowinds is located on the border of North and South Carolina in Charlotte in the heart of NASCAR country. It was only fitting that the park design a racing-themed roller coaster that bears the nickname of racing legend Dale Earnhadt. Intimidator is an exciting ride. It’s the tallest, fastest, and longest roller coaster in the South East.

David Downie: As a general trend, I revisit places that have fallen off the tourist maps, or that have been taken for granted, and delve deeper into favorite destinations such as Paris and Rome, which are infinitely rich and fascinating and satisfying. Cities: Paris (art, culture, walks, museums, food, wine), Rome (art, culture, walks, museums, food, wine), Genoa (food, wine, scenic beauty, history, magically restored architecture), Bologna (food, food, food and atmosphere and architecture), Helsinki (scenic beauty, atmosphere, seafood). Countryside destinations: Burgundy (wine, food, vineyard and mountain scenery), Massif Central (hikes, scenery), Drome-Provencal (ditto, plus truffles and wine), Tuscany (art, culture, museums, wine, food, vineyard and mountain scenery), Italian Riviera (ditto).

Don George. (1) Peru‘s Sacred Valley. I finally made it there this year and was enchanted by scenery, history, culture, people, cuisine. Machu Picchu is of course life-transformingly amazing but the other untouted ruins all around the valley are equally amazing. (2) Kyoto, Japan. The cobbled back quarters of this ancient city are as enchanting now as they were when I first visited 30 years ago. Tiny temples, impromptu shakuhachi concerts, apprentice geisha in full splendor. (3) Aitutaki, Cook Islands. Incredible island scenery, hospitable people, stunning lagoon, peaceful and laid-back lifestyle, thriving dance, carving, and textile arts scene.

Tom Johansmeyer. If you’re a cigar smoker, nothing beats Esteli, Nicaragua. On just about any budget, you can spend a few days down there. Make a few calls in advance, and you’ll have the opportunity to tour tobacco fields and cigar factories. Even if you aren’t a smoker, it’s amazing to see such craftsmanship in action.

Jeremy Kressmann. Hanoi, Vietnam for its great history and architecture, awesome cuisine, and intriguing Cold War sights. Secondly, Laos. The rugged north of the country has great hikes and the buzzing cultural capital of Luang Prabang is totally worthwhile.

Grant Martin. Bogotá. Forget what you’ve heard about kidnappings, drugs and danger, Bogotá is the new cosmopolitan capital of South America. With quaint, brick streets, a buzzing commercial district and a hip, young population, there’s not much to dislike about this place. Get there before the rest of North America figures it out.

Melanie Nayer. Shanghai. The city of old and new hit a turning point when it hosted the World Expo, and set the stage for Shanghai to become one of the most talked about–and visited–cities in the world.

Sean McLachlan. Ethiopia. Friendly people, rugged scenery, historic sites, and great coffee. What more could you want? Beautiful women, good food, adventure travel? Ethiopia has all that too.

Laurel Miller. Ecuador, especially Cotopaxi National Park (see above), because it’s stunningly beautiful, uncrowded, and there are loads of outdoor recreational opportunities. Ecuador is an amazingly diverse country, kind of like a mini-Peru but with very low-key tourism. There’s also great whitewater rafting/kayaking and mountaineering, fascinating indigenous culture, beautiful colonial cities, delicious regional foods, and the people are wonderful. There’s so much more to Ecuador than just the (admittedly spectacular) Galapagos.

Meg Nesterov. Bulgaria is cheap, creative, and easy to explore. Several of my most well-traveled friends already rave about it. Go now before tourism overexposes the country.

Heather Poole. Positano, Italy. It’s just so beautiful and the food is amazing. I’m a flight attendant and I have a four year-old son, as well as a husband who travels over 100,000 miles a year for business. Our life is like a game of tag. So when it comes to vacations all we want to do is relax. I love to be able to sit on a balcony and let the vacation come to me.

McLean Robbins. Telluride. It’s not new, but as ski towns go it feels non-commercial and relatively untouched. You’ll find truly friendly people (and your fair share of under-the-radar celebrities), but also the country’s best extreme skiing. And it looks like heaven when it snows!

Annie Scott. I’m big on Vienna. It’s a magical city that embodies everything I think of when I think of Europe: culture, history, cathedrals and class. I think the Swiss Riviera may be the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Lake Geneva looks so pristine you could drink it, and the French influence gives everything from the dining to the shopping that elusive je ne sais quoi. Lastly, I had a marvelous trip this year in Zambia where the wildlife was rampant and the scenery was enchanting and unexpectedly dynamic: sweeping plains, dreamlike riverscapes and incredible trees. The thrill of being immersed in the bush is hard to match.

Alex Robertson Textor. Lima, Peru continues to pop. While the Inca Trail is old hat, Lima is emerging as a major destination on its own. Perhaps most notable is the Peruvian capital’s excellent restaurant scene, which is as disarmingly inexpensive as it is top-notch. I also have to mention green, rustic, jaw-droppingly beautiful Dominica as the Caribbean’s top adventure destination. Dominica has a number of fantastic eco-lodges that showcase the island’s natural beauty wonderfully and are priced reasonably.

Karen Walrond. As a diver, I love Cayman. Love it. Very touristy, but the diving is beyond anything I’ve seen, and i’ve been diving all over the world. And I’m partial to Grand Riviere in my homeland of Trinidad, which isn’t touristy at all. Between April and June, you can see Giant Leatherback turtles nesting in Grand Riviere.

[Image: Flickr | alepheli]

The Gadling budget travel manifesto

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Over the past two weeks we’ve upped our budget travel coverage here at Gadling. We’ve published stories on budget-friendly Caribbean destinations, budget-friendly European destinations, Thanksgiving hotel deals, hardcore budget travel suggestions, New York City budget travel tips, local budget travel secrets, cheap local fast food worldwide, great sites for planning budget-friendly European travel, and how to find affordable ski deals.

Our recent hyperactivity around budget travel is no accident. We want to improve Gadling’s standing as budget travel resource, as a go-to site for budget travel tips, information, and inspiration.

In order to give this new resolve some oomph, a Gadling budget travel manifesto is in order. The goal here is to intervene in a travel media landscape that sees luxury travel as the universal objective of all travelers by glorifying budget travel and budget travelers. Budget travel is exciting and sophisticated and it needs to be recognized as such.

The lure of aspirational travel

People love to read about expensive resorts and impossibly dear travel accessories because they’re exciting to contemplate. In this respect, they fulfill a function not a million miles from pornography. And like porn, they’re also a lot of fun. The problem is that just as pornography does not provide a good map for most human relations, aspirational travel does not offer a useable guide for most forms of travel. Worse yet, aspirational travel often comes to cloud impressions of travel and actually convince many, many people that travel is an endeavor that can only be engaged at unmanageably high price points.

The focus on aspirational travel in the travel media creates all sorts of strange situations. Reading through a typical American travel magazine or even the weekend travel section of big newspaper, one might believe that $500 per night is a reasonable mid-range rate for a night’s hotel accommodation. Honestly, this is outrageous. When push comes to shove, how many people can actually afford such rates?

Budget travel can mean many things. It can mean finding a deal on a hotel, cruise, or air journey. It can mean traveling with very little money and simply making do. It can mean organizing travel around friendship networks, or joining home exchange or couchsurfing membership programs. But however it might be defined, it doesn’t include hotel rooms that run $500 per night.

Budget travel is sophisticated travel

Here are three assertions about budget travel in general and in relation to luxury travel that might at first seem counterintuitive.

1. Budget travel enables better interaction with local culture than does luxury travel.

2. Budget travel is more sophisticated than luxury travel.

3. Budget travelers are more creative than luxury travelers.

I’ll anticipate a few knee-jerk criticisms and try to answer them here in advance. Obviously not all budget travelers are savvy. Many are in fact the opposite. But it is just as certain that many, many (most?) luxury travelers are not at all sophisticated–not truly and fully in the spirit of cultural engagement and courageous exploration.The first assertion here is probably the most self-evident. Budget travelers very often stay in modest accommodations run by locals or long-term expats in settings surrounded by locals. Unlike luxury travelers, who are typically cocooned in hermetically-sealed compounds radically separated from the surrounding locales and their residents, budget travelers have an easy time experiencing the richly local dimensions of their destinations.

Points two and three: Budget travelers work creatively to find interesting places to visit and build itineraries. Unlike many luxury travelers, they don’t particularly care about international brands, and don’t stop thinking about how to spend their time after they’ve booked a stay at a particular five-star chain hotel and exhausted the menu of in-house spa treatments. Budget travelers approach their travel with open minds about where they might stay and about which sorts of inexpensive accommodations might be on offer in particular locations.

Budget travel glamour

Budget travel is real travel. It’s often challenging and not always predictable, yet it’s also often far more glamorous than its reputation.

There is glamour in amassing tons of passport stamps on a dime, in accumulating personal top ten lists of the best dive bars in a particular city, and in getting your high culture quota in the standing-room only zone. There are joys in cheap apartment sublets, in couchsurfing, in volunteer tourism, in hitchhiking, in slow buses. There are pleasures in delicious and fresh local fast food.

But evidence of the glamour of budget travel is too often absent even within the tiny budget travel media, which often prioritizes an upwardly-mobile demographic and ignores countless very good budget accommodations in favor of stylish hotels with stratospheric nightly rates. This approach may be good for advertising revenue but it renders the very concept of budget travel unrecognizable. And in the process, the real glamour of budget travel is lost.

Gadling’s budget travel content

Moving forward here at Gadling, we are committed to providing better targeted budget travel advice in the form of hotel and restaurant tips, strategic booking suggestions, local secrets, and solid general information for getting the most for your money.

We want to hear from you. We want to know which budget travel questions you want answered and which types of budget-friendly advice you most need. How can Gadling best deliver the budget travel goods?

[Image: Flickr / cyclonebill]

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova to climb Kilimanjaro

by Kraig Becker on

54-year old tennis legend Martina Navratilova is in Tanzania this week where she’ll be climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa at 19,340 feet. She is making the climb to raise funds for the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting sportsmanship and a code of conduct in athletics, around the world.

The nine-time Wimbledon singles winner has never been above 12,000 feet before, so the altitude could prove to be a bit of a challenge. She lives in Aspen, Colorado however, so has a good level of acclimatization before ever arriving on the mountain. Navratilova doesn’t seem too concerned about the challenges of the climb though, as she has called the trek “just a basic hike.”

She does hope to raise 100,000 euros, or about $134,000 through the donation page on the Laureus webpage. A little more than half of that amount was already raised before she after left for Africa.

While still playing professional tennis, Martina was viewed as one of the toughest competitors to ever set foot on the court. During her long career she won 167 individuals titles, including 31 Grand Slams, and dominated the sport like no woman before or since. When she reaches the top of Kilimanjaro, she plans to hit tennis balls off the summit of course.


Three swimmers injured by shark attack in Egypt

by Sean McLachlan on

Three Russian tourists have been injured by a shark in the waters off Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt, the BBC reports. The Red Sea resort, popular with swimmers and scuba divers, rarely has problems with sharks. It appears to have been an oceanic whitetip, which Jacques Cousteau once called “the most dangerous of all sharks” in his book The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea.

One of the victims is in critical condition. Most of the waters around Sharm El-Sheikh have been made off-limits until authorities can capture the shark and release it into the open ocean.

There have been some grim incidents involving sharks in recent months, including the human remains found in the stomach of a shark in the Bahamas. That said, it’s important to remember that the average swimmer has a very low risk of being attacked by one. You’re much more likely to drown. So if you’re into the ocean, keep an eye out for sharks, but be more aware of things like weather and currents.

[Photo courtesy Thomas Ehrensperger via Wikimedia Commons]