The first six months of 2010 saw international tourist arrivals grow by 7% according to the August Interim Update of the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer. This result confirms the recovery trend beginning in the last quarter of 2009 and is expected to continue in the second half of the year at a somewhat more moderate rate. The Interim Update was officially presented at the 4th UNWTO/PATA Forum on Tourism Trends and Outlook (2-4 September, Guilin, China) to tourism stakeholders from the public and private sector, as well as academia.

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Source: HotelNewsNow.com

Colorado skiers again can choose from a trio of ski sales this weekend with Christy Sports re-entering the fray after its inaugural venture last year.

Lakewood-based Christy created Powder Daze as a one-time sale last year to reduce bloated inventories. But the retailer is back, prodded by customer demand for more discounted items.

“We’re not making much money at this sale — and I can’t imagine the other guys are either — but we found out from last year that it’s a great way to engage our customers,” said Randy England, director of marketing for Christy.

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Source: The Denver Post

Local skiers/snowboarders have a price advantage over visitors — if they choose to take advantage.

By purchasing before the snow falls, Utah residents are allowed to buy season and daily passes at discounted rates.

What’s involved is a little pre-planning by picking a resort or resorts for the 2010-11 season, then checking out available options.

Those buying locals pre-season passes and tickets will need to prove they are residents of Utah.

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Source: Deseret News

July was the best month for visitor performance that Hawaii has seen in five years. Arrivals and spending were up on all islands and from every major market, according to the Hawaii Tourism Authority, which released monthly visitor statistics yesterday. It was the first month that saw all indicators rise since September 2005.

But don’t expect July’s momentum to last beyond the summer season. Softness is already building as Labor Day approaches and the start of school keeps would-be travelers closer to home. The lack of fall group business, a legacy of the financial bailouts and the AIG effect, will continue to weaken tourism.

Still, it was a really good run while it lasted.

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Source: Honolulu Star Advertiser

Regional airlines are consolidating to reduce overhead so they can offer lower rates to their larger airline partners, while major airlines are selling their feeder carriers to create a larger pool of smaller carriers with which to do business.

“It’s a game of survival, not of growth,” said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group. “The good old days of having six majors, each with their own collection of supporting regionals, are gone.”

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Source: Reuters

Like other real estate asset classes, golf course development in the United States is cyclical, with booms occurring during the 1930s and 1960s. The modern golf boom started during the 1990s and stretched into the mid-2000s. This latest stage of golf course development began at an unprecedented rate of 400 courses a year. Although new golf course development started out as for-profit endeavors, numerous alternative motives for development were also at work. Eventually, these forces led to an overbuilding of the market and a question of the relevancy of the future of the golf market.

In order to understand these forces, it is necessary to understand who is developing golf courses and for what purpose. The “who” part of that equation includes real estate developers, resort developers, municipal agencies, economic development, reclamation projects and wealthy individuals. The “what” comprises myriad reasons, but the primary motivations during the past decade had little to do with the long-term profitability of the golf course, and even less to do with short term profitability.

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Source: HotelNewsNow.com

Three in 10 mobile phones in use in the U.S. are Internet-enabled smartphones. Almost one in five (19%) of those smartphone users have downloaded a travel-related application, according to the Ypartnership/Harrison Group survey of 2,524 households in the U.S. with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.

Mobile devices are destined to play an even larger role in the sale of travel services in years to come and travel marketers can’t rely on their existing website format to get information to consumers.

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Source: BizReport.com

The Nicklaus Cos. and Emagineering LLC have partnered to create a Web site that provides information on more than 130 Nicklaus Design courses and the ability to arrange stay-and-play packages at those courses.

The Web site, www.nicklaustravel.com, provides club profiles, photos and video, a tee-time reservation system and exclusive packages.

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Source: GolfWeek.com

Sugarloaf Mountain will soon have the distinction of being the biggest ski resort east of the Rocky Mountains after company officials outlined plans to expand into neighboring Burnt Mountain.

The expansion will double the amount of skiing terrain at Sugarloaf.

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Source: MyFoxMaine

If there’s one thing I’ve learned covering the sports and tech industries, it’s that athletes (or at least those marketing at athletes) are as nerdy deep down as your average IT guy. While sports like skiing should be fun on their own, there are all kinds of techy gadgets like cell phone gloves and GPS trackers that can infuse the average ski vacation with an unhealthy dose of geekiness.

This season you’re going to see a whole lot more cell-phone-obsessed rubes out in the Back Bowls, because Vail has announced that it will launch what it calls EpicMix. Playing off its Epic Pass (which was actually a positive addition to the Vail experience), EpicMix is a new system that will utilize smartphones like the iPhone and Android handsets toward on-mountain stat calculation and communication.

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Source: InventorSpot.com

At least eight people died after attackers hurled gasoline bombs into a crowded Cancun bar early Tuesday. Although the bar is outside the popular resort zone in a residential area unfrequented by tourists, the apparent drug-related killings are among the latest in a string of bad news for Mexico’s beleagured tourism industry.

Early Wednesday, the bridge that connects Puerto Vallarta and the Pacific Coast resort area of Riviera Nayarit collapsed in rain-swollen currents, stranding travelers. The bankrupt Mexican airline Mexicana suspended operations last weekend, leaving passengers across several continents. And on Friday, the U.S. State Department extended its Mexico travel warning to note that children of U.S. government personnel are being ordered to leave the business capital of Monterrey because of concern about recent gun battles and kidnappings in the city.

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Source: USA TODAY

A new report Tourism Outlook: USA from Visa Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!v/quotes/nls/v (V 69.00, -0.54, -0.78%) indicates the tourism industry has begun to rebound during the first six months of 2010. From Jan. 1 — June 30, 2010, spending by international visitors to the U.S. on their Visa-branded payment cards was up 20 percent over 2009 levels. At the same time, Americans are spending at higher levels when traveling internationally: spending by U.S. travelers abroad on Visa cards was up 9.3 percent in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009.

“The United States continues to be a major source market for international tourism and a popular destination for travelers around the globe. The growth in inbound spending in early 2010, particularly from source markets such as China and Brazil, reinforces how Asia-Pacific and South America are seemingly the first to emerge and rebound from the challenging environment that defined 2008 and 2009,” said Bill Sheedy, president, North America, Visa Inc.

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Source: MarketWatch.com

Months of perfect weather in northern New England have helped the region’s tourism industry rebound from a dismal 2009, but consumers still wary of the economy have been tight with their money and shopping for bargain-basement prices.

Overall, hotel occupancy rates have increased, more people are stopping at visitor information centers and highway traffic has risen, officials said. Businesses that rely on tourists say more customers — but not free-spending ones — are coming through their doors.

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Source: BusinessWeek.com

U.S. travelers are using their smart phones for navigation, GPS functionality, and to compare or even book travel, according to the new Ypartnership/Harrison Group 2010 Portrait of American Travelers. The survey finds that nearly two in 10 (19 percent) travelers have downloaded a travel-related application to their smart phone.

Among those travelers, nearly one-half (47 percent) have navigated a destination using the built-in GPS functionality or searched for the latest information on flight schedules and delays (46 percent). Nearly three in 10 (29 percent) have compared airfares or hotel rates or shared information or photos about their travel experiences (28 percent) using their smart phone. Approximately one in six of travelers surveyed (18 percent) has booked air travel or lodging, or viewed a virtual visitor guide that provides information on things to do and see while visiting a destination (15 percent). Finally, more than one in 10 (11 percent) has used their smart phone to download and redeem mobile coupons, while one in 20 (6 percent) has downloaded an audio walking tour of a specific destination.

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Source: Travel Pulse

A few months before its five ski resorts open for the season, the Colorado-based Vail Resorts has unveiled a preview of something called Epic Mix, a set of Web and mobile apps based on skiers’ activity as logged by radio frequency (RF) readers around its resorts.

It’ll go live when the first of Vail’s resorts, Keystone, opens for the season in early November. Vail Resorts’ season passes and lift tickets are already RF-enabled, but with Epic Mix, interested skiers can unlock “pins” in the manner of Foursquare badges, get ranked on a vertical-feet leaderboard, post all manner of ski-related updates to Facebook and Twitter, and–via a mobile app–see their friends’ activity on the slopes in real time so that it gets way easier to meet up for beers at the lodge. There’s also a kid-oriented site for children under 13, which limits sharing to the kids’ parents and has its own set of kid-friendly pins.

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Source: CNET.com

The good times may not yet be rollin’ in the Big Easy, but New Orleans appears to be heading in the right direction.

The city’s vibrant tourism industry was crippled when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore with devastating force five years ago. The number of visitors to New Orleans — a city in which 35 percent of jobs were reliant on tourism before the storm — dropped dramatically in the weeks and months that followed, raising fears that the city would never fully recover.

Today, New Orleans isn’t quite back to what it once was, but as the city marks the fifth anniversary of the disaster, tourism is on the rebound.

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Source: Travel on Today (The Today Show)

The BP (BP) Deepwater Horizon spill happened in the middle of nowhere in the Gulf of Mexico, but it also took place, as every event of global import now does, in the realm of social media. The company and the government learned — again — the hard lesson that controlling the information and imagery from the spill is nearly impossible in today’s climate. That meant the tourism industry around the gulf faced a big problem — the images, without context, had linked the entire region to the unprecedented number of images of slicks, oil-soaked wildlife and constant footage of the Macondo well gushing millions of gallons of crude, even though parts of the gulf were spotlessly clean.

“When you think gulf tourism, you typically think Florida,” says Will Seccombe, chief marketing officer
for Visit Florida, the state’s tourism division. Tourism is crucial to the state — Florida pulls in about $20 billion in visitor spending annually out of the $34 billion gulf tourism industry. To survive, Florida had to separate itself from the rest of the gulf in the minds of travelers.

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Source: Fortune Tech (CNN Money)

Vacations have become a luxury for many Americans trying to make ends meet in this economic downturn, but there are signs that people are slowly, even timidly, on the move again.

Families who postponed trips last year are making modest vacation plans, travel agents say. And business owners or executives who felt it was insensitive to travel as they cut costs and laid off workers are again making plans to get away, leisure industry experts added.

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Source: The New York Times

After traversing a mountain path 6,000 feet up in the Swiss Alps last week, where cows with clunky bells far outnumbered people, I stumbled into a bare-bones restaurant—and was shocked to see a college classmate whom I hadn’t seen in at least 15 years. The surprise wasn’t so much that I saw someone I knew—we all have tales of extremely random encounters in out-of-the-way places. Rather, it was that I ran into an American at all.

I’ve spent the better part of 10 days investigating vital economic issues, including the impact of European fiscal austerity in France, the sources of the strong Swiss franc, and the ultimate Swiss mystery: how the cost of food rises (yet the quality falls) the higher you trek into the Alps. But in my journey, I’ve missed seeing a few things: multitasking French service workers, solicitous Swiss, and, my college classmate notwithstanding, American tourists. This summer, it’s An American in Paris, not A Horde of Americans in Paris.

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Source: Newsweek

Denver transportation officials broke ground last week on a new rail line that will link the city’s downtown to Denver International Airport.

The East Corridor line, which is estimated to be completed in 2016, is the first of four lines that will be built for a new commuter (heavy) rail system in the region. Denver has light rail service, but it stops far short of the airport.

Denver joins a growing list of U.S. airports that are trying to promote public rail transportation. Others that will be connected directly via rail in the coming years include Dallas Love Field, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Miami, Dallas/Fort Worth, Oakland, Washington Dulles and Los Angeles.

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Source: USATODAY.com

Grupo Mexicana suspended operations at its three airlines Saturday “until further notice,” citing the financial problems inherited when the group changed owners a week ago.

The company’s three airlines — Mexicana Airlines, MexicanaClick and MexicanaLink — stopped all flights at midday Saturday, according to a statement from the group

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Source: CNN

Snowmass Village, the Colorado ski town neighboring Aspen, got a lift in 2007 when Hypo Real Estate Holding agreed to arrange $520 million of loans to complete a $1 billion year-round resort.

Three years later, construction has halted on parts of the 19-acre Base Village in Snowmass, where some buildings are wrapped in plastic, and Hypo has been seized by the German government. When the lender, whose 2009 implosion was Germany’s biggest bank failure since World War II, tried to foreclose on the developers in July, it was met by a countersuit that accused it of a “shameful repudiation” of its obligations.

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Source: Summit Daily News

Elected officials and managers in Colorado ski towns are growing increasingly concerned about the potential passage of a trio of state ballot measures that would cut fees and taxes that go to local governments and special districts, and limit their borrowing power.

“There is great angst, and I share it,” said Sam Mamet, executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, which represents 265 of the state’s 271 municipalities.

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Source: Aspen Daily News

The number of Labor Day travelers is projected to be up slightly this year, but whether that translates into a noticeable performance bump in United States hotels is uncertain.

Travel association AAA is predicting a 9% increase in the number of Americans traveling 2-6 September, with approximately 34.4 million holiday makers taking a trip at least 50 miles from home.

“While media reports on the state of the U.S. economy are mixed, many Americans are still interested in taking one more trip as the summer travel season comes to a close,” said Glen MacDonell, director of AAA Travel Services in a news release. “It is encouraging to see more Americans planning to travel to visit family, friends and exciting vacation destinations.”

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Source: HotelNewsNow.com

More Americans will get away for the Labor Day weekend this year, yet stick closer to home as they try to get the most for their money, AAA said Thursday.

The auto club expects 34.4 million people to travel at least 50 miles from home between Sept. 2 and Sept. 6. That’s up nearly 10% from 2009 — one of the lowest Labor Day volumes in AAA’s record keeping history — and below the 45 million who traveled during the Labor Day weekend in 2008.

It’s an indication that there is some pent-up demand for trips, but people are watching their budgets carefully as they worry about the sluggish economy, AAA Travel Services Director Glen MacDonell said.

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Source: USA TODAY

These days, bashing online travel agencies has become a popular sport. The likes of Expedia, Travelocity and Priceline are being blamed for commoditizing hotels, for decimating rates, and for training travelers to demand deep discounts. We can probably find a way to blame them for that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico too.

Not that OTAs need defending, but the reality is, we as hoteliers share the blame. It’s our signature on OTA agreements. We give them access to inventory at heavily discounted rates. And we’ve taught travelers to look for the best deals on OTA sites.

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Source: HotelMarketing.com

North American corporate airfares and hotel rates in 2011 generally will increase as rental and chauffeured car costs decrease, according to Carlson Wagonlit Travel. The travel management company this week issued its 2011 forecast, which also predicted per attendee meeting costs next year could jump by double-digit percentages.

The forecast was published against a backdrop of strengthening corporate travel and meetings demand. CWT said it handled 13 percent more transactions globally in the first half of this year versus the first half of 2009. Transactions increased by 18 percent in North America; 8 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa; 44 percent in Asia Pacific; and 48 percent in Latin America. Nevertheless, “business travel has not yet returned to pre-recessionary levels, and it remains to be seen whether it ever will,” according to CWT North America president Jack O’Neill. “As a result, it is tough for travel buyers who must begin budgeting, often without full visibility across their own organization or a crystal ball for corporate travel influences.”

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Source: The Transnational

Travel Market Report found that travel agents aren’t necessarily upset by the low hotel rates. In fact, travel sellers pointed out that this offers a tremendous opportunity to up-sell clients who normally wouldn’t book luxury hotels.

Across the geographic board, demand for luxury hotels (both chain and independent) is strong and occupancies have risen over 2009. For instance, in the Americas 57.6% of luxury properties achieved at least 60% occupancy every night in 2009. So far this year that percentage has risen to 62.5%.

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Source: HotelMarketing.com

Time Magazine poses the right question, “Will the White House Fight to End the Cuba Travel Ban?”

Although not as dramatic and immediately beneficial as Congress ending all restrictions, the answer is tremendously important to US travelers and the industry that serves them.

The Obama Administration must choose soon how much to enable travel to Cuba for non-tourist people to people purposes, which is all it is able to accomplish on its own. It has obligated itself to respond to Cuba’s ongoing release of “Black Spring” prisoners. Half of those who were still imprisoned since 2004 have already been freed.

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Source: The Huffington Post

Carlson Wagonlit Travel North America has released to its clients forecasted 2011 pricing and rate information for air travel, hotel stays, use of ground transportation, and meeting and event spending in North America. CWT anticipates a number of suppliers will successfully implement price increases next year, indicating overall increases in business travel demand as economic conditions in North America continue to improve.

CWT forecasts domestic economy airline pricing will increase 3 to 5 percent, while domestic first and business class pricing will decrease 2 to 7 percent. Meanwhile, international economy and business classes are each expected to increase 3 to 5 percent, while international first class should increase by 4 to 6 percent. Factors impacting overall air pricing in 2011 include higher demand for travel, increases in crude oil prices, capacity reductions of 2 percent domestically and 1 percent internationally compared to 2010, and limited availability of highly discounted fares.

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Source: Travel Pulse