Travel + Leisure is now accepting applications for our annual Global Vision Awards. Do you know of a travel company or organization that's changing the world for the better—preserving cultural heritage, saving environments, or giving back to the communities we travel through? Please drop us an email at tlglobalvision@aexp.com or encourage a representative to fill out this year's application, available here (travel companies) and here (other organizations), and return it to us by April 6, 2012.
Long after the meal is eaten, the china remains. Dish: 813 Colorful, Wonderful Dinner Plates (Artisan Books; $35) by Shax Riegler, a former Travel + Leisure editor, is a revealing portfolio of porcelain spanning centuries and continents.
What happened when the quintessentially Parisian photographer Brassaï turned his lens on New York and New Orleans? Brassaï in America 1957 (Flammarion; $49.95), an album of 150 photos (some unpublished) that shows the beauty and eccentricities of these cities—and the spell they continue to cast.
The colorful, annotated paintings collected in Paula Scher MAPS (Princeton Architectural Press; $50) offer a world informed by the graphic designer’s poignant and incisive commentary.
With more than 3,000 paintings from the 13th to the 19th century, the Louvre’s collection of European art is unparalleled. Each and every work is reproduced in The Louvre: All the Paintings (Black Dog & Leventhal; $75).
Jean Govoni Salvadore, a former public relations executive with TWA and Italy’s Villa d’Este, has been something of a Zelig in postwar Europe. Her photo-illustrated memoir, My Dolce Vita (Glitterati Incorporated; $30), recounts six decades of shoulders rubbed during her travels around the globe.
1. Innovative book publisher Taschen is going digital with a new series of iPad apps. Among the first up: Yes Is More($9.99), a comic book-cum-architectural manifesto from the Danish design group BIG.
2. Concerned about health on the road? The iMedjet app(free; iPhone/iPad; Android) stores health records, key contacts, and instructions on what to do in case of different medical emergencies.
3. For an insider’s experience of London, book a room with onefinestay.com (picture, above). The villa-rental agency specializes in posh pads (fancy an ambassador’s residence in Mayfair?) that come with concierge service.
4. Finally, a digital photo frame with a sense of style: the sleek, Android-based DIA Parrot by Nodesign($500; parrot.com), which uses LCD panels to illuminate and enhance your pictures.
Do you know a travel company that's changing the world? We want to hear about it.
Travel + Leisure's annual Global Vision Awards recognize the outstanding efforts of individuals and organizations that are working to preserve the world's natural and man-made treasures.
Last year’s winners included everything from the enormous CityCenter complex in Las Vegas, a pioneer in green-building techniques, to Kenya’s Micato Safaris, which is helping to fund the education of thousands of children in Nairobi.
If you know of an organization that we should consider for the 2011 awards, please drop us an email at tlglobalvision@aexp.com or encourage it to fill out this year's application, available here (Travel) and here (Non-Travel).
The winners will appear in our November issue.
Amy Farley is the news editor at Travel + Leisure.
Do you know a travel company that's changing the world? We want to hear about it!
In 2010, travel and tourism is expected to contribute some $5.8 trillion to the global GDP. Lately, more and more of that money is being channeled in ways that give back to the places we travel though. You know what we're talking about: the tour operator in southern Africa that's providing local communities access to education and jobs. The South American cruise line that's meticulously conserving fragile habitats. The European hotel group that's contributing to the preservation of a vulnerable historic monument. The multinational corporation that's lightening its carbon footprint and developing the technology that will allow others to do the same. And the multitude of travel companies that selflessly step in with resources and on-the-ground expertise when disaster strikes around the globe.
Every year Travel + Leisure 's Global Vision Awards recognize the companies and organizations that are leaders in responsible travel. If you know of one that we should consider for the 2010 awards, please encourage it to fill out this year's application, available here:
Winter’s back may be broken, but that doesn’t mean ski season’s over. In fact, this may be the perfect time to hit the slopes, while the snow’s still good and the deals are enticing. The keys to spring skiing: book quickly—and don’t forget your sunscreen.
Park City, Utah Over a dozen Park City properties are offering Ski Free and Stay Free packages that offer travelers a free night of lodging and a lift ticket at one of the area’s three resorts (the Canyons, Park City Mountain, and Deer Valley) when you book a four-night package. Valid for reservations between March 28 and April 11, 2010; see parkcityinfo.com for more.
Attention would-be jetsetters, adventurers, vagabonds, and nomads: It’s time to call in that month-long sabbatical you've been due at work!
JetBlue has just announced an unprecedented deal aimed at people with a serious case of wanderlust. Through August 21, the airline is selling a month-long “All-You-Can-Jet” pass for $599 that offers travelers unlimited flights between September 8 and October 8, 2009 to any of the airline’s 56 destinations.
I admit it: I may the only Brooklynite left who hasn’t jumped on the bicycle trend. (Blame my Minnesota roots: I remain loyal to the birthplace of the Rollerblade.) But though I don’t own a bike at home, I do love to hop on two wheels to explore a city while on vacation, and am pleased report that more and more hotels are pedaling to, well, urban pedalers.
Fifteen years after South Africa ushered in democracy, nothing embodies the promise, excitement, and contradictions of the country quite like Johannesburg. Most travelers, however, barely scratch the surface of the city. Passing through on their way to safari lodges and game reserves elsewhere in the country, they find time for a trip to the Apartheid Museum, a tour of Soweto, dinner in one of the lovely northern suburbs, and then they’re back at the airport to catch a flight out.
I’ll spare you the proselytizing that I’ve been delivering to friends ever since returning from a four-day trip there in March (“You must stay longer than just one night!”), and cut to the chase: if you want a deeper understanding of this complicated, fascinating city, you must call Robin Binckes, tour guide extraordinaire.
It’s not as if Cape Town, South Africa’s waterfront capital of glamour, needed another notch in its already seriously stylish belt, but when Sol Kerzner, the outsized hotel impresario responsible for South Africa’s Sun City, Atlantis Bahamas and Atlantis The Palm in Dubai, One&Only Resorts, and Connecticut’s very own Mohegan Sun, says he wants to return to his homeland with a waterfront resort that will be the social center for Cape Town’s gorgeous and moneyed, well, by God, that’s what he’s going to do.
When I saw it, just a few weeks ago, the new One&Only Cape Town on the V&A Waterfront was something of an inauspicious sight, full of mud, dust, loose wiring, and the footprints of thousands of construction workers. The resort, a 91-room main building and 40 suites set on a private island in the adjacent marina, was racing to meet an April 3 opening day deadline. I had my doubts. But Lesson No. 1 in South Africa: never underestimate the power of Mr. Kerzner. The property opened—on time and with the requisite celebrities on site to toast its arrival (Nelson Mandela, Matt Damon, Mariah Carey).
And what of Kerzner’s vision of creating the city’s next great social hub?The hotel, designed and decorated by Adam D. Tihany in a restrained Bali-goes-on-safari style, is anchored by over 14,000 square feet of dazzling public space. There’s Gordon Ramsey’s Maze restaurant, a Nobu outpost that looks like a bento box on steroids (above), and, in between, an enormous bar and lounge with 23-foot-tall windows looking onto the marina and Table Mountain beyond (above, top). (There’s also, in an odd homage to Paris, an on-site boulangerie.)
Set among the rather insipid establishments of the V&A waterfront, it's a downright seductive space. Add to that rooms and suites that are positively huge and kitted out like nothing else in the city (iPod docks with surround sound, Nespresso machines, and Tihany’s covetable custom-made furniture) and it looks like Kerzner’s got his wish.
Amy Farley is a senior editor at Travel + Leisure.
