Courtesy nicola @ Flickr
Yountville, in the heart of Napa Valley, is not only a popular weekend destination for wine lovers, but also home to one of the best restaurants in the world.
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In the editorial of the second-anniversary issue of Monocle Magazine, Tyler Brûlé ventures what may be a new pattern of global culture: In a world where everything is starting to look more alike rather than unique, each person or company is an outpost that challenges convention and points to a new way of marketing, selling and building community. This assertion based on the experience of their many correspondents dispatched around the world may be a sign of the times: as we grow aware of the world around us and educate ourselves in the ways of other peoples and cultures, we can’t help but notice that things abroad are not too different from things around the corner. In the midst of a global recession it’s easy to panic if we are all doing things in the same ways, buying the same products, asserting the same way of live. After all when the entire boat is going down, you don’t want to be where the majority of the crowd is (pardon the extreme analogy). Instead each one of us will look at doing things a little bit different, trying to use all those lessons on global culture to [...] Courtesy Sapphireblue @ Flickr Have you noticed how every little corner of Switzerland looks like a postcard? No wonder they are ranked as one of the countries with the best tourism infrastructure. The World Economic Forum announced its Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2009 will be released on March 4. A couple of weeks ago I was asking people where to find better data that could be used to identify emerging destinations and based on the 2008 version of the report, this may be the best source. The report provides details on a number of factors that combined make it attractive to develop the Travel & Tourism sector. These factors are: Policy rules and regulations In 2008, through the methodic evaluation of these factors, countries like Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Australia & Spain were at the top of the rank. However, with the abundance of details provided by this report the one thing that comes to mind as an important deficiency is the fact that only country level data is provided. Well, for a report of this scope is absolutely necessary to maintain this general approach. But I’m certain that the more granular this information is provided, the [...] What if you could spend the next two years of your life travelling around the world, taking the time to really get to know each place you visit and nurture long lasting relationships with locals at each point? Which destinations would you choose, knowing that you want to cover as much world as possible but don’t want to feel in a race? Mostly inspired by slow-travellers like soultravelers3, who have found the way to engage on an open ended trip around the world, taking time to settle in each community they visit and making it a way of life, I realized it was possible to engage on a similar experience by splitting the journey into one to two month long segments, each one of which would be done every year. So this year you devote your summer to a little village in Spain and the next year you immerse yourself into the calm serenity of the northern Italian alpine villages. Each year you complete another leg of this tour around the world… The nature of such journey allows you to engage in meaningful discovery of the culture that makes each destination unique, and not [...] After my post on the emerging destinations index, I got some really good feedback about how misleading calling them “emerging destinations” was. As I replied in the original comment thread it was mostly a derivative from the original “emerging markets” index which is where I got the data from. It just happens that some emerging markets have been top tourist destinations for a long time. So it’s likely a good idea to amend the unfortunate name as I plan to continue tweaking the index until it ranks real emerging destinations. The idea is to come up with a certain way to organize information about destinations in such a way that those that have good infrastructure but have not yet developed as top tier tourist destinations can be identified. As it is, the index has yet to factor a number of things: It must account for current inbound tourism. This must be an inverse correlation as we would want those regions with fewer tourists to bubble up in the rank. I found an old table with the World’s Top Tourism Destinations, which will do for now, but it will work much better the [...] |
 Global Culture Blog by Juan Gonzalez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. |
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