And if you’re willing to go all the way, they’ll even disable your in-room televisions. It’s all part of the “Unplug Hilton Head” package, available through February.
Instead of staying wired, the hotel is encouraging guests to mellow out and turn their attention to the South Carolina Low Country’s more natural amenities, such as plentiful Atlantic beachfront, tidal marshes, and off-street cycling trails. Read more…
A rendering of the W Brisbane.Credit W Hotels Worldwide
W Hotels is planning a return to Australia. The Starwood brand plans to open a W Brisbane in Queensland in 2018, with a full line-up of luxury amenities.
Plans for the property show three shiny metallic towers — one for the hotel and two for high-end office and residential spaces — at the edge of the Brisbane River in the emerging downtown riverside district.
The hotel will have 305 rooms and the usual W extras: a 24-hour business center, a spa and workout facility and an indoor heated swimming pool. Read more…
The pool at Le Méridien Delfina Santa Monica.Credit Viceroy Hotel Group
As the season of mad discounts approaches, travelers can once again look to Hotel Week N.Y.C. for a chance to score a cheaper stay in one of the city’s finer establishments.
And while the sale usually limits travelers to a wintry post-New Year’s getaway on the East Coast, this year organizers are offering a warm-up on the West Coast: the inaugural Hotel Week Los Angeles.
Both promotions, which actually span more than two weeks each, offer discounted rates of $100, $200 or $300 a night at boutique hotels that usually charge an average of $500. Those rates are available in Los Angeles for stays between Nov. 29 and Dec. 14 at a range of accommodations, including Le Méridien Delfina Santa Monica on the shore; the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, home to the first Academy Awards ceremony; and the Luxe City Center in downtown Los Angeles Read more…
The Cycling House has added Solvang, Calif., to its staple of winter training camps for the 2014-15 winter season.
Along with 13 weeks of camps at its usual base in Tucson, Ariz., two weeks of training camps will be held in March in Solvang, in the Santa Ynez Valley. The Danish-style community of Solvang, in Santa Barbara County, features European-style streets, country roads and varying terrain with challenging climbs suitable for training (1,500 to 7,000 feet of elevation gain).
Cycling House camps are designed for endurance cyclists and triathletes looking to escape cold winter climates.
Camps last six days with 45 to 80 miles of guided riding per day, chef-prepared meals, opportunities to run and swim, and plenty of time to relax and recover. Read more…
“People, not places, make the trip,” is the motto of Tripr, a new digital travel application that allows travelers to connect with others who plan to be in the same place at the same time.
Of course, the wrong person could really break a trip, which is why this app allows for some preliminary research on potential travel buddies.
With Tripr, users create a profile and then enter information about a coming itinerary, like the name of the city they’ll be visiting, an attraction they plan to see (the Grand Canyon, Mount Kilimanjaro) or a special event they’ll be attending — “Austin City Limits” or Art Basel in Miami, for instance.
After entering their dates of travel, they can search for others who have crossover dates in that destination, and basic preferences can be set to search for a specific type of person to connect with, whether that’s a 20-something American male with whom to hike Machu Picchu, or a more mature Roman local who might know the city’s best trattorias. Read more…
Using your hotel room phone for domestic or international calls usually means getting hit with a prohibitively high bill: Properties charge a premium running up to several dollars a minute to dial direct and even tack on service fees for calling locally.
Some hotels, though, are going in the opposite direction by providing their guests the perk of unlimited free talking anywhere in the world.
The High Line Hotel in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood began offering free calling when it opened last year and tries to make chatting fun with rewired black 1930s Western Electric rotary phones in each room.
The Wheatleigh in Lenox, Mass., opened two decades ago but introduced free dialing just a few years ago because the general manager, Marc Wilhelm, wanted guests to stop feeling nickeled and dimed for making calls. The Ranch at Rock Creek, in Philipsburgh, Mont., has had a free call policy since it opened in 2010, as does the Sonora Resort in British Columbia. Read more…
The Appellation Trail event in 2013.Credit Flavor! Napa Valley
If a food festival features food from celebrity alumni of the Culinary Institute of America and is hosted in California’s Napa Valley, there’s a good chance it’s going to appeal to travelers.
That’s the one-two punch of Flavor! Napa Valley, which opens its fourth festival next month as a benefit for the C.I.A.
Flavor! contributors include regional farm-to-table chefs and local vintners and viticulturists, all with well-seasoned careers. Stephen Barber of Farmstead at Long Meadow Ranch in St. Helena and Kirk Grace of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars are to be among them.
They and more than a hundred others will be part of the festival’s largest event, the Appellation Trail, which includes samplings and tastings from the region’s most venerated restaurants and wineries.
And a few familiar faces never hurt, so visitors also can expect appearances from the chefs Todd English, Rocco DiSpirito and Larry Forgione, as well as from the master sommelier Andrea Robinson. Read more…
Debris from the Virgin Galactic space plane that crashed in the Mojave Desert during a test flight on Friday.Credit Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
Walkabout
A weekly capsule of travel news curated by our writers and editors.
Questions Arise An investigation into the crash of a Virgin Galactic space plane that killed one pilot continues, focusing on the failure of a technical configuration. (The New York Times)
Crowd vs. Surge An Uber user turned to a crowd-funding site to pay her $362 fare, which she racked up owing to surge pricing. The kicker: she actually raised $500. (Business Insider) Read more…
Bourbon barrels in Kentucky.Credit Taste Vacations
After more than 17 years of organizing adventure travel tours, including in-line skating vacations, Zephyr Adventures is starting Taste Vacations with eight domestic and international culinary tours.
Zephyr has long mixed cardio with carbs, but Taste Vacations’ upscale outings are a response to customers’ requests to have the option of leaving the hiking boots at home while focusing on global dining adventures, its founder, Allan Wright, said. Read more…
The restaurant Taktika Berri in Barcelona.Credit Hollis Duncan/Culinary Backstreets
The street-food-focused tour operator Culinary Backstreets now offers a bigger bite of the cities in which it operates by designing multiday dining guides.
Each “Eatinerary” begins with an in-depth online questionnaire surveying the traveler’s food preferences and familiarity with the city. It also asks travelers to rank themselves from one to five stars as a match to such statements as “I will cross town and stand in line in the rain for that perfect bite from a hole-in-the-wall stand,” and whether they would “like to be eating more or less” of seasonal specialties and street food, among other choices.
Rather than creating an hour-by-hour, or meal-by-meal itinerary, the resulting guide, which comes in the form of an emailed pdf, offers suggestions for breakfast, lunch, dinner and food markets that cover about three days in each destination. Read more…
