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Tourists Are Swapping Their Japan Guide Books for Instagram

Tourism is booming in Japan, but a growing number of visitors are ditching their guidebooks for an app better known for celebrity snapshots and images of food: Instagram.

The social photo-sharing service is proving to be especially popular among those seeking destinations off the beaten track. Nagato, located on the southern tip of the main island of Honshu, saw more than 1 million visitors in 2017, a 36-fold increase in three years. After CNN profiled the town as one of “Japan’s 31 most beautiful places,” postings of the local shrine started to flood Instagram.

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Continue @ Bloomberg

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8 surprising differences between traveling in the US and the UK

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Traveling in the US and “travelling” in the UK are two vastly different ventures, and in more ways than just driving on opposite sides of the road.

While not many US citizens travel internationally compared to their UK counterparts — about 42% of Americans have passports , compared to 76% of British citizens — even domestic journeys come with their variations. From cars and trains to buses and planes, people in both places have preferred methods of getting around, as well as preferred places to get to.

Below are eight of the surprising ways that traveling differs across the pond.

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Continue @ INSIDER

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I Spent $1K Per Month Traveling The World & Here’s How I Did It

I spent a year traveling the world on $1000 a month. It’s normal for people to take a look at my Instagram and assume that I come from money. They assume that I’m traveling on Daddy’s dime, whether that be my actual father or a sugar daddy. The reality is that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, travel costs money like everything else. However, most people don’t realize that travel can be affordable AF. I wasn’t sleeping in five-star resorts, but I was traveling the world, and that’s all I ever wanted. I spent $1000 per month traveling the world, and here’s how I did it.

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Continue @ Elite Daily

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The 10 Best Travel Apps Every True Traveler Needs For Her Next Trip

Your wanderlust finally got the best of you. You’ve spent hours daydreaming about the Mediterranean Sea, and the bright lights of Tokyo. As much as you tried to ignore your passport, you just couldn’t do it any longer. So, you booked a few plane tickets, and now you’re spending a semester abroad or backpacking throughout Europe. To your friends, you’re a true traveler. You take trips on the reg, and know exactly how to pack a suitcase. But, every true traveler needs the best travel apps on their phone. Before you reach your next destination, make sure you hit download.

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Continue @ Elite Daily

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Six Senses Fiji wellness resort offers a solution for stressed out insomniacs

Send me here … and I’ll never come home.

 

Get some sleep-inducing exercise in the villas' private pools.

It was one of those minor issues that had become so woven into my life, I simply accepted rather than fight it.

Sleep. As in, getting a good night’s sleep. A sleep that goes all the way through the night without interruption.

What I had was sleep I’d regularly wake from. It was hard to tell how long this had been going on. I reckoned it was only a few months; my beloved pointed out it had been a recurring theme of our decade-plus together.

Either way, it doesn’t occur to me when I accept a short stay at the newly unveiled luxury wellness resort wellness resort Six Senses Fiji that I might find the start of a solution.

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Continue @ The Australian Financial Review

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The best places to travel to are the ones where no one cares you’re there

As someone tasked with providing travel advice for readers, I often feel like I’m on a fool’s errand. After all, one person’s dreamy beach vacation, city break, or cruise ship cabin is another person’s overpriced packaged holiday, stressful urban jungle, or touristic nightmare. Who am I to tell them where to spend their precious time off?

That said, when people on the internet and in real life seek travel advice, virtually no one says they want to end up in a place choked with tourists and overpriced restaurants (even if the vast majority of people do end up there). They want that elusive—if ill-defined—tenet of authenticity. In my own travels, I’m always on the lookout for that feeling, the one that has me thinking: “Everyone should come here—but I hope they don’t, because then it’ll be ruined.”

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Continue @ Quartz

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Chef Marcus Samuelsson Shows You The Richness Of Culinary Travel

Culinary travel has definitely been on the rise in recent years—according to research compiled by the website Booking.com, 51% of U.S. travelers select a destination for its culinary offerings and 25% plan to take a dedicated culinary trip this year, many to New York, the top pick for a food destination. So it made sense for the site to join forces with chef Marcus Samuelsson, owner of Red Rooster Harlem among others, and star of the current PBS series “No Passport Required” currently airing on PBS stations and streaming on Eater.com to launch a culinary recommendations section called “A Taste of Travel.” Samuelsson will list his restaurant picks for four cities: New York, New Orleans, Myrtle Beach and San Francisco.

For the series, Samuelsson traveled to six U.S. cities on a discovery tour but the restaurants weren’t necessarily the focus; he was after the immigrant culture expressed through their food scene. In New York, he explored the Indo-Guyanese community in the borough of Queens, in Miami, the Haitian community, in New Orleans, Vietnamese, in the Detroit area, the Arab community, the Mexican community in Chicago and in Washington D.C., the culture of the country of his birth, Ethiopia.

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Continue @ Forbes

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Lessons in Luxury: Three simple things that could make luxury travel so much better

Taj Lake Palace Hotel Udaipur

I won’t deny that part of my role as The Telegraph’s luxury travel editor involves assessing amuse-bouche and staying in penthouse suites, but there are more mundane aspects to the job. One is absorbing reports commissioned at great expense by tour operators and hotel groups keen to gain insights into the needs of luxury travellers.

The latest to hit my inbox, courtesy of “strategic consulting partner” OgilvyRED, is about the habits of younger, increasingly wealthy consumers in Asia. The report uses the phrase “bluxury travel” – a clunky portmanteau of business and luxury – and says these individuals want holidays that are “aspirational, enviable – and, above all, Instagrammable”. It adds that young travellers share “opinions through the internet, particularly on social media sites”. How revelatory!

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Continue @ Telegraph.co.uk