Starting May 1, 2013, Golf In A Kingdom kicks off, showcasing 12 of Thailand’s 260+ courses and resorts to promote the land of smiles as a major force in golf tourism.
“Golf In A Kingdom has played a major role in Thailand becoming one of the world’s top three golf tourism destinations, so we have decided to showcase it to golf tour operators and media from around the globe,” founder Mark Siegel said this week.
In its fifth year, Golf In A Kingdom aims to capitalize on their unique formula of golf, entertainment, value, golf infrastructure, safety, climate and friendly Thai people.The May 1 international launch will be held at Siam Country Club’s Plantation Course and attended by tourism executives from Asia, Europe, North America and Australia.
As 60 percent of travelers coming to Asia for golf already choose Thailand, Golf In A Kingdom hopes to compete with Spain and the United States as the world’s most popular golf destination.
Think golf is not a big deal in Thailand? At OneAsia’s $1 million Thailand Open at Thana City Golf & Sports Club in Bangkok earlier this month, it was big news when Prayad Marksaeng became the third Thai to win their national championship with a two-stroke victory as we see in this video:
Despite a lagging economy, the growth of the ultra luxury sector in the travel and hotel market is hotter than ever. Travelers are increasingly seeking personalized, customized experiences and high-touch service above and beyond what traditional luxury hotels can provide. As a result, many companies have new or improved specialized programs to cater to this new breed of traveler.
What makes the club interesting? Abercrombie & Kent has been offering ultra luxury tours and travel experiences for more than 50 years, but this is their first membership model.
The new A&K Lifestyle Club offers travelers (and their partners) a personal Travel Consultant and access to a network of 50 offices on seven continents to plan custom, high-end vacations, as well as a 24/7 global concierge service.
For a $3,750 joining fee and an annual cost of $10,500, members get a personal Lifestyle Manager who will act as the local knowledge and “fixer” both at home or wherever in the world they are. They will advise and help with lifestyle requests, from sending flowers to organizing restaurant reservations or gaining access to exclusive clubs and sold-out events. In addition, members gain instant access worldwide to logistical, medical and security advice around the clock. These team members are available whether or not you’re traveling with A&K. In addition to the travel benefits and special member’s only discounts, travelers also get gratis airport lounge passes and two free nights at A&K villas each year.
Want an even higher end experience? They’re relaunching their popular private jet journeys in 2014 with special African safari trip, booking here now for a 19-day trip at about $80,000 per person.
Can’t even dream of dropping $80k on vacation? They’ve also launched a more affordable travel product, dubbed “Connections,” where groups of up to 44 travelers enjoy similarly customized trips and high-end hotels at a much lower price point.
What do you think? Would you buy into this exclusive club, or are you apt to try to put together these types of trips on your own?
Condé Nast Traveler (CNT) released its annual “Hot List” of the world’s “best new hotels” this week, featuring 154 newish properties in 57 countries around the world. CNT boasts that 62 of these hotels have room rates that start at $300 per night or less but is that really a realistic threshold for separating expensive hotels from affordable ones? I’ve been traveling the world for more than 20 years and I very rarely spend more than half that on accommodation.
Obviously there’s a huge difference between what $300 a night buys in New York compared to Buffalo, or Tokyo compared to Saigon, but in most places around the world I can usually find a pretty nice place to stay for $100 per night or less – sometimes much less. And I’d rather take a 12-day trip and spend $100 per night on hotels than a four-day trip where I spend $300 per night on accommodations.
I went through CNT’s Hot List and was dismayed but not surprised to see just one hotel – the Tantalo Hotel in Panama City, Panama – where room rates start at $100 per night or less. The introduction to the list explains that CNT staff and stringers anonymously evaluated more than 1,000 properties and whittled the list down to 154 of the very best new hotels.But in their ten months of research they could find only one place where room rates start at $100 or less? Meanwhile there are 32 listings for hotels with room rates between $501-$999 per night and seven listings with room rates of $1,000 per night or more? My guess is that for every one traveler who wants to spend $1,000 per night on a hotel room, there are about a million who want to spend close to $100.
I have no doubt that most of the hotels that made their list are delightful places, but many of the recommendations are useless for everyone but the 1 percent. For example, just one hotel in Greece made their list, and it’s the Amanzo’e, where room rates start at the low, low price of just $1,450 per night. The reviewer also mentioned that the place isn’t on the beach (they do have a Mercedes SUV shuttle to one though) and notes that the service could be better.
I spent six weeks in the Greek Islands last year and wrote about a host of very nice hotels, all with room rates starting at $100 per night or less, (see here and here). At Lila’s Guesthouse on the island of Syros, for example, the owners picked us up at the ferry terminal at 2:30 a.m. and did our laundry for us, both free of charge. And at the Palazzo Duca, (see photo) a beautiful yet affordable new boutique hotel in Chania, on Crete, the nice family who runs the place bent over backwards to help us. So if you’re going to recommend just one new hotel in a country, why pick one that has poor service and charges nearly $1,500 per night?
I guess none of this should be surprising for a publication that in March featured an article on how the .01 percent travel (“How to Vacation Like a Billionaire“) in which the author lounged around on a private island near Grenada that can be rented for a cool $165,000 per night.
“Though the price may seem a little astonishing,” the author writes, “there are quite a few ultra-affluent travelers who can afford it – and their ranks are growing. Last year, more than 2,000 people on earth were worth $1 billion or more, 185 more than in 2011…lower the bar to include people worth $30 million or more…and there are 187,000.”
In the warped world of travel media, 187,000 people in a planet that has more than 6 billion seems like a lot, I suppose. Hell, even I’m convinced, pretty soon we’re all going to be renting out our own private islands!
The truth is that luxury hotels are good potential advertisers and most have P.R. companies that know how to get their properties on the radar screen of writers and editors at all the right publications. It’s perfectly legitimate for P.R. firms to do what they do, and many of the places they promote are terrific, but the reality is that the hotel recommendations you read in the glossy magazines and even in some websites and newspapers might be right down the street from places with no P.R. muscle that are just as good but half the price.
To be fair, CNT is a great magazine and their focus on high-end travel is the rule not the exception in the travel industry. Last March, I analyzed the hotel recommendations of a variety of glossy travel magazines, including CNT and concluded that most but not all of the publications I looked at were catering more to the 1 percent than to the rest of us. Based on what I see in CNT’s Hot List this year, it looks like business as usual.
Of the 154 new hotels on the list, 25 percent have room rates starting at $501 per night or more, 13 percent have a base rate between $401-$500, 21 percent range from $301-$400, 21 percent are at $201-$300, and 19 percent of their selections ranged from $101-$200 per night. (The lone $99 entry represented .06 percent of the sample) 60 percent of CNT’s selections have room rates starting at $301 per night or higher; and nearly 40 percent have base rates of $501 per night or more. Of their 62 listings that weigh in at $300 or less, 27 of them have no review – just a listing. (And remember that these are base rates, so a place that has rooms starting at $300 might typically charge much more).
Maybe I need to hobnob with a ritzier social circle but I don’t know anyone who spends $500 per night on a hotel room, even on a special occasion. I read publications like Afar and Condé Nast Traveler because they both offer high quality features writing and beautiful photography. And leafing through their pages can be like a little vacation in and of itself, but I’d love to see more realistic recommendations for places I can actually afford. And I sincerely hope that $300 per night isn’t the new affordability threshold for hotels, because in my book, that’s still a lot of dough.
I was in Mexico last December, just before the 21st of the month. The date would come and go without catastrophe, of course, but the fringe theories had brought Maya culture to the forefront of the media and I took the opportunity to learn a bit about the ancient and modern Maya myself. My time spent in Merida was grueling, but rewarding. My room at Hotel Dolores Alba, which was located near the noisy downtown center of the city, had a shower that spilled water from the bathroom into the rest of the room when used. When I swapped out that room for another, I was happy to find my luggage still dry after a shower. I propped a chair up against the flimsy door at night because the lock was wobbly. I mysteriously watched a disturbing movie starring Ashley Greene all the way to the end while taking a break from the sun one afternoon. I had black coffee and refried beans for breakfast in the hotel lobby, which was adorned with portraits of Frida Kahlo. There was something unmistakably charming about the place; maybe it was the open-air courtyard bolting the wings of the hotel together. But charm doesn’t cancel out exhaustion and I was beat.
%Gallery-186761%I had been attempting to keep a more or less vegan diet while in Merida and as one might imagine, this isn’t easy to do in any city and just plain difficult to do in most foreign countries. Guacamole, beans and fresh juice had become my sustenance and the sun was my motor, revving me out of bed each day and hovering over me from one place to the next. The streets of Merida were enthusiastically loud that weekend; they were loud late at night and loud early in the morning. I was missing sleep and calories and looking forward to the two “off” days I’d planned for myself and my husband before we flew back to New York. We’d booked just two nights at Grand Velas Riviera Maya. We would be there for a total of 43 hours.
My fingers were crossed as we made the four-hour trip from Merida to Riviera Maya. All-inclusive resorts often get a bad name – they often earn a bad name. But we wanted to detox and just stare at the ocean for a couple of days. We hadn’t ever had the chance to honeymoon and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally stop looking in every nook and cranny for story-worthy happenings or perfect photo ops while traveling and to just relax. I was depleted. I didn’t want to have to leave our room to hopelessly look for vegetarian food in town. I didn’t want to have to drive around during the two days off trying to entertain myself. Grand Velas, so it seemed through my research, had everything I needed on site and for once, I wanted that. They had kayaks and snorkeling gear, bars and restaurants, spas and shopping – I never dreamed I’d be so tired as to want this manifestation of serenity, but it was what I needed and I only hoped the accommodations and amenities would match the glowing reviews online.
We entered through a washed out fortress of a wall that stood erect behind turquoise pools of water in a man-made beach at the resort’s entrance. We were shown to our beachfront room by our personal concierge, a man who somehow anticipated most of our needs before they could be vocalized. When we asked him for suggestions of where in the resort to find vegan or vegetarian food, he made reservations for us at their French restaurant, Piaf. When we sat down to eat, our waiter informed us that the restaurant had put together a special menu just for us – it was almost entirely vegan, a nearly impossible accomplishment for a French restaurant. All of our other meals panned out the same way. Grand Velas’ website had conveyed flexibility for diet restrictions, but after eating mostly guacamole, beans and juice for four days, I was shocked at the spontaneous fluency in plant-based foods the chefs on site proved to have. We had several dishes to choose from no matter how or where we dined, whether we were in one of the resort’s restaurants, having food brought to us as we lounged on the beach or ordering from their 24-hour room service late at night. We scheduled and received some of the best massage treatments we’ve ever had at their spa. We swam in the pools. We admired the lapping waves of the Caribbean.
We saw only a few other guests while there; it felt as though we had the grounds to ourselves. The reviews were right. Grand Velas is the antithesis of the traditional all-inclusive resort where kids run amok, meals are slopped onto plates from buffets, cocktails are made from bottom shelf liquor and the beach is crowded. I wish I had stayed longer in Riviera Maya, where a much-needed break became an accidental honeymoon.
My first encounter with the Bolivian mania for perfect U.S. dollars occurred at 3 a.m., as I blearily stood in line at Immigration, attempting to pay for my entry visa. I’d been in transit for over 30 hours, and was fumbling in my travel wallet for the stack of twenties I’d set aside specifically for this purpose (they want that $135 in USD, no exceptions).
The immigration agent examined each bill with an anal retentiveness surely rivaled by past appraisers of the Hope Diamond. He immediately tossed two perfectly-fine looking bills back at me.
“What’s wrong with these?” I asked. “They are damaged,” he snapped, and returned to closely inspecting my remaining twenties, running his fingers along each edge, and holding them up to the light. I looked at the offending bills, seeing nothing wrong. “Why can’t you take this one?” I queried, holding out the bill in question. My silly question would have made my fresh-off-the-boat status obvious, even if I weren’t standing in the immigration line.
“There is a crease in it,” the officer said impatiently, pointing to a miniscule dent. Fortunately, the rest of my money passed muster. The final insult? Having my visa photo taken (despite the fact I’d brought passport-size photos with me for this very purpose). I now have a very special souvenir of what I’ll look like in another 40 years. That cabin air is really dehydrating.
Over the next two weeks, I continued to observe the Bolivian obsession with flawless dolares de Estados Unitos. By then, I knew the reason. Counterfeit money is a big problem, but they’re not nearly as concerned about the state of their bolivianos as they are our currency. Admittedly, their paper money is fairly pristine. Every trip to an ATM was an anxiety-inducing event … what if the bills were wrinkled, or torn? What if, while in one of the godforsaken, far-flung outposts I was visiting, someone required U.S. dollars and I couldn’t obtain any perfect ones? In Bolivia, you can often pay in either currency, so some travelers prefer dollars because they find them easier to use than trying to convert bolivianos.
Fortunately, it seems most Bolivian cash machines dispense quality bills. I was even able to bail out a befuddled traveler attempting to purchase a bus ticket. His dollars were simply not up to snuff, so I traded him some of my crisp Jacksons to defuse the escalating shouting match.
After I traveled on to Paraguay, I discovered that they’re almost as strict about the appearance of U.S. dollars. It’s a national joke, however, that this attention to detail doesn’t extend to their guaranies. Never have I seen such woefully limp, bedraggled, filthy paper money. Which is ironic, given all the armed guards posted outside of banks and change houses. Then again, money is money, no matter how pretty. If only someone could tell the Bolivians that.