Habib Bourguiba Mausoleum in Tunis, Tunisia. / Flickr

Sidi Bou Said’s signature blue-and-white houses are framed with sweet-smelling jasmine and bougainvillea. The soft sunshine is making them seem so picture-perfect it’s hard to associate this with tanks and barbed wire. A short cab ride away from the Tunisian capital, this coastal hilltop town is full of steep cobbled streets, beautiful buildings and lazy cafés. It captures the appeal of a Tunis minibreak – stunning, stylish and seemingly undiscovered. But yes, there is the odd army tank in Avenue Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s central artery, and rolls of razor wire close off parts of the street next to the interior ministry and the French embassy.

Political tensions have been running high recently: a political assassination in March; two deaths at an attacked US embassy late last year; flashes of ultra-religious violence in the country that started the Arab spring in January 2011. But some of the coverage of this North African country has lately swung into the hysterical – in fact there is mostly calm on the capital’s streets and a welcome reception for anyone who chooses to go beyond the scary headlines and actually visit.

Tunisians are keen to get their tourism industry running again – visitors dropped from 7 million in the year before the revolution to 3 million in the years after. Tourism has mostly been of the package, beach-resort variety along the country’s sun-dappled Mediterranean coast, but the capital, Tunis, deserves to be a destination in its own right. With its satellite beach towns – such as the lovely Sidi Bou Said and the tranquil, upmarket La Marsa – and its Unesco World Heritage medieval medina lodged alongside more modern attractions, Tunis is ideal for curious travellers.

The city’s striking architecture – like the language, an intriguing juxtaposition of French colonial and Arabic – is best viewed at a slow stroll, with frequent pit stops for coffees and pastries. The stunning detailing of all these period buildings – hypnotising floor tiles, wrought-iron balconies, ornate, bold blue doors and extravagant Ottoman features – needs time to sink in. And nobody would hurry a faux-melodramatic haggle with the medina’s pottery, textile and jewellery traders.

This slower speed will give you time for another Tunis attraction: the street food. Two unmissables are ojja, a harissa-laden tomato stew with added meat of your choice (chicken or merguez sausage being favourites), and lablabi, a spicy, brothy chickpea soup served over baguette pieces with a raw egg stirred into your steaming, traditional-pottery bowl to cook. Don’t peer too closely into the giant soup pot (there may, for instance, be cow’s hooves in there) and don’t take offence if the person ladling the broth over your bread is picky about the way you crumbled it into your bowl – this is to ensure your dish is at its best consistency.

Locals carefully rate the street food joints. One ojja stall in Tunis’s central market (in the meat-district street selling rabbits and chickens, I was told) currently holds top rank. Also highly rated is the packed and chaotically efficient Chez Chouchou in downtown Tunis (Rue Borj Bourguiba), where each order is made on the spot in front of you.

But if street isn’t your preferred style (you want to eat while seated, say, or to use something other than bread as cutlery), there are plenty of restaurants to choose from. Staunch favourites include Chez Slah (14 bis rue Pierre de Coubertin), a family-run restaurant known for serving the best fish in town, and Dar el Jeld (dareljeld.tourism.tn) in the medina, an 18th-century palace serving high-quality traditional Tunisian cuisine.

Meanwhile new ventures in small, home-grown cafés have sprung up since the revolution, part of a trickle of start-ups hoping to grow Tunisia’s hospitality industry from the ground up. These include the brand-new Cook’s in Sidi Bou Said (facebook.com/cooksfood), which does innovative seasonal salads alongside perennial pastries, and Lyoum in nearby La Marsa (facebook.com/lyoumconcept) – lunch menus are based on what’s available locally, and it also does a line in kids’ clothing, also made locally.

Ethnic-meets-modern is the theme of the city’s boutique hotels. Dar el Medina (darelmedina.com, from $205), one such hotel de charme in the old city, is a beautifully furnished Ottoman, multilevel building full of tiled floors and elegant terraces, with period furnishings alongside contemporary paintings and latticed windows. There are more boutique hotels in Sidi Bou Said, with Dar Said (darsaid.com.tn, €190), Villa Didon (villadidoncarthage.com/en, from €235) and Dar Fatma (darfatma.com, €96) getting gold stars.

There are no current UK travel warnings to Tunisia, but you are advised to stay alert to political events that might have an impact on western tourists. Also be ready for conversations with helpful Tunisians, mostly about what you think of their capital – and whether you’ll return.

Essentials

British Airways (ba.com) flies London to Tunis from £83 one way. For more travel tips, go to guardian.co.uk/travel/tunisia

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The top of the Chrysler Building in front of a stormy sky. Rafat Ali / Skift

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced the launch of New York’s largest tourism campaign in decades, committing nearly $60 million last week to grow the industry, create jobs and attract even more visitors to the Empire State.

The governor’s announcement came at the conclusion of the New York State Tourism Summit, where hundreds of tourism experts gathered in Albany to discuss ideas and new ways to bring tourists to every corner of the state.

As the fifth-largest employment sector in New York, tourism supported 714,000 jobs and generated more than $29 billion in wages in 2012. After discussions with tourism experts and hearing the concerns and ideas of local and international tourism officials, the governor announced a series of initiatives designed to make New York the tourism capital of the world.

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The sun sets behind a monument in Alcalá de Henares, a small city near the Spanish capital of Madrid, whose historical centre is one of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. Sitio do Neto / Flickr

Despite rising competition from tourism destinations in Asia and emerging economies, Europe welcomed more than half of all international tourist arrivals in 2012, or 535 million foreign visitors, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

Europe also earned the largest regional share of international tourism receipts, which reached an estimated total of $1075 billion in 2012.

Tourism spending in Europe accounted for 43 percent, or $457 billion, of the 2012 tourism earnings. Last year’s earnings by region are outlined below:

Although Europe maintains the number one spot, Asia and the Pacific are a close number two.

Year-over-year change in tourism receipts signals this global shift away from Europe and towards Asia. Europe’s tourism receipts increased just 2 percent between 2011 and 2012, the smallest incline after the Middle East’s 2 percent drop, while Asia’s earnings grew 6 percent.

The tourism receipts of individual countries tell a similar story. Five of the ten top tourism earners are European countries with Spain, China, and Italy all in the top five. Only two Asian nations make the list and both are technically part of China.

Although European countries are still reporting strong tourism receipts, their earnings are growing at a much slower rate than those countries in the Asia and the Pacific region.

Six of the ten fastest growing tourism earners in 2012 are located in Asia and the Pacific and two others are located in Africa. Only Sweden and Finland make the list from Europe.

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Household actual disposable income per head in 2011 among developed countries

The UK has plunged down an economic wellbeing league, falling from fifth place to 12th over six years, according to a new report that underlines the pressure on Britons’ finances amid rising unemployment.

The Office for National Statistics ranked OECD countries in terms of disposable household income from 2005 to 2011, but on a separate ONS labour-market ranking Britain dropped even further, falling 12 places over the six years.

The ONS looked at various economic factors that might affect wellbeing across the OECD club of mostly rich nations as part of its scheme to measure national wellbeing. It ranked the United States top in terms of disposable household income, followed by Luxembourg. Chile was ranked bottom out of 30 countries.

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Statisticians said part of the UK’s drop down the disposable household income table was due to the devaluation of the pound, which raised the price of goods and services in the UK relative to other countries. But the ONS also noted other factors including changes to taxes and benefits.

“Over the course of the recession, as unemployment rose, people paid less in taxes and claimed more benefits – causing less of a strain on household income. However, as the economy emerged from the first period of contraction (measured by GDP), households began to feel the squeeze on their incomes as these effects wore off,” the ONS said.

Opponents of the government’s austerity drive seized on the apparent deterioration in UK household finances. The Trades Union Congress said the squeeze on incomes reflected slow wage growth, currently running at little more than 1% on average, compared with inflation of 2.8% at the latest count.

“The combination of recession and austerity has taken its toll on household finances, with income levels in the UK falling behind many of its European neighbours,” said TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady.

“Even before the recession, household spending in the UK was far more reliant on debt than in other advanced economies. In order to address this as a country we need to obsess less about housing bubbles and focus instead on securing decent pay rises and creating better paid jobs.”

The ONS report also looked at spending and wealth and said the UK remained “relatively strong” compared with other OECD countries on those measures.

It was on unemployment that the UK suffered the most dramatic drop in the international rankings. However, the ONS noted the “UK labour market has been more resilient than in previous recessions” in that employment did not fall as far and unemployment did not rise as much.

With the unemployment rate at 8% in 2011, the UK was more than halfway down the labour market league table. It ranked 21 out of 34 countries. That ranking was down 12 places from 2005.

Norway was top of the league with unemployment at just 3% and Spain was bottom at 21.6%.

The UK had one of the biggest drops over the six years although the US suffered similarly, down 13 places to 25th.

The ONS put the shakeup in the labour market rankings down to the nature of the recession.

“Many of the countries that have overtaken the UK and US in the rankings are smaller economies, less exposed to the 2008 downturn, which centred on the US and Europe. The fall of 12 places in the international rankings for the UK has therefore come despite historically the most stable labour market seen in a UK recession,” it said.

Household Actual Disposable Income

1. United States
2. Luxembourg
3. Norway
4. Germany
5. Switzerland
6. Australia
7. Austria
8. France
9. Canada
10. Belgium
11. Sweden
12. United Kingdom
13. Finland
14. Netherlands
15. Denmark

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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The mobile visitor centers are used both to inform visitors already in a location, like Arlington Convention and Visitors Service‘s truck that travels between the nearby neighborhoods, and draw tourists to a new city, like Visit Eau Claire‘s Fun Patrol that attends music fairs across the state.

The most recent mobile launch is from Visit Saint Paul, which unveiled its mobile visitor center Paul just last week.  Similarly, Missouri National Recreational River rolled out a  mobile ranger station last month to attract visitors in other parts of the state to the actual river.

All tourism organizations emphasize the importance of taking their message “to the people” when announcing the new initiative.

Troy Thompson, founder of the Travel 2.0 Consulting Group, spoke in favor of closing traditional visitor centers at the Missouri Association of Convention & Visitor Bureaus Annual Conference in 2012.

His advice for destination marketing organizations was as follows:

Take your message to the people!

Conventions, sporting events, holiday weekends at the airport, marketing invasions of the next town and why not a road trip to Vegas?

Sure, keep some brochures in the thing. Line the outside with flip-up panels and iPads. Customize the interior with 4 or 5 information stations. Any why wouldn’t you pimp that thing out with a great paint job, including a huge map of the local area.

Tweet the location. Build a following. Show up spontaneously and give out great prizes. Become a visible part of the community.

This is not a campaign.

This is a long-term solution.

A permanent shift to reflect the changing consumer.

Sait Paul tourism officials speak on the importance of tourism and the expected impact of their new mobile visitor center in the video below:

Click through the slideshow above to see the mobile visitor centers of ten U.S. cities.

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A Greek man stand in front of his grocery in the city of Thessaloniki. George Groutas / Flickr

The Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, issued an unusual appeal on Tuesday, asking his compatriots to put on their best face as the debt-choked country prepares to accept 17 million tourists – an all-time record.

Although mired in its worst economic crisis in modern times, Greece is braced for a surge in arrivals with visitors from Russia, Germany and Britain leading the revival of an industry that only last year appeared on its knees.

“We will have at least 17 million tourists this year. This development is a vote of confidence in our country. It [means] liquidity, money for the market and new, healthy places of work,” said Samaras, who has headed a conservative-dominated, three-party coalition since June.

“I appeal to every citizen for the good of the country to help so as to put on our best face to foreigners,” he said exhorting Greeks to pay attention to the quality of services, products and prices that they offered.

Industry figures, based on hotel bookings and airline capacity, project more than 1 million additional tourists this summer. Arrivals from Russia, alone, are expected to increase by a third to over 1.2 million. Airlines have lined up more than a million extra seats and scores of new routes to the country.

With tourism accounting for almost 20% of GDP and jobs, the rise has been met by jubilation in a country whose image has been blighted by street riots, prolonged strikes, social upheaval and political unrest since the outbreak of the crisis in late 2009. Hit by a sixth straight year of recession, a record 27% of Greeks – more than anywhere else in the EU – are out of work.

“I think the increase is indicative of the leading role tourism will have in the recovery of our economy,” said John Retsos, president of the Hellenic hotel federation, which represents 7,000 hoteliers in Greece.

The rebound has been attributed to an array of factors, ranging from political stability to turmoil in the Middle East.

“The climate, this year, is much better,” added Retsos. “Greece’s efforts [at fiscal consolidation] have been acknowledged by our EU partners and without compromising quality hoteliers have lowered prices significantly and that means great value for money.”

Ironically, the German chancellor Angela Merkel, a hate figure for many Greeks because of her insistence on Athens adopting punitive austerity measures, has provided a helping hand by publicly calling on her countrymen to visit Greece. Summer bookings from Germany have shot up by 15%.

Increasing revenues to pre-crisis levels will remain key to recovery, say experts. “Our target is to reach €11bn (£9.3bn) in direct revenues,” said Andreas Andreadis, who heads SETE, the country’s main tourism body.

“An average €650 per arrival is spent in Greece,” he said. “It is crucial, now, that revenues are increased.”

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Prince Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, chairman of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, said that from this year Saudi would issue ‘Umrah-Plus’ visas, which would permit supervised tours of other sites to those visiting the country on Islamic pilgrimages.

The conservative Gulf kingdom, which is home to Islam’s two holiest mosques, currently does not issue tourist visas to travellers.

“The month long visa can also be used for tourism,” Prince Sultan said on the sidelines of an event in Dubai. “What changed is that we’re now moving to Islamic history sites to revive those to make them more presentable and to create museums and experiences.”

Prince Sultan added that the Saudi government was investing “a lot of money” in building and renovating about 30 museums and Islam-themed attractions in Makkah and Medinah.

“There’s a lot of heritage hotels now being constructed in small villages with mud and stone, or whatever. We’re serious about reigniting the heritage of Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Last year the country saw tourism revenues rise 10% to SR61.8bn, the majority of which is derived from Islamic pilgrimages and visitors from other GCC nations, who do not require visas.

Prince Sultan said that tourism was also a major contributor to the country’s efforts to increase employment among Saudi nationals. “Tourism is the second most Saudiazed economic sector, with 28%. That’s big for a sector that is new and has not yet been fully supported,” he added. “We’re serious about making tourism a major player in the economy and also in job creation, and keeping Saudis in Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi Arabia is spending billions on developing new and existing transport infrastructure. Work is currently being undertaken on 27 airports across the country to increase their capacity to 82m passengers within the next three years, Prince Sultan said.

He also hoped that the country would be able to emulate some of Dubai’s success in becoming an East to West travel hub. “People can stop, perform Umrah, and connect from Madinah or from Makkah. We also connect from airports like Riyadh, and Ha’il and Jizan for cargo and support,” he said. “We have the added advantage of the location of Saudi Arabia, the accessability of Saudi Arabia, the airports, the abundance of fuel, and the services.”

© 2013 ITP Business Publishing Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company. 

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"The Great Gatsby" film was released over the last few days, and you can't blame Newport, Rhode Island, for trying to make a tourism buck off it. / Warner Brothers

The much-anticipated 3-D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire, hit theaters May 10. That makes this the perfect time for a glamorous Jazz Age getaway in Newport, Rhode Island, where several scenes from the 1974 movie with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston were filmed.

FRIDAY

Check into the elegant Vanderbilt Grace Hotel (41 Mary St., 401-846-6200), summer rates from $520), where you’ll be greeted with a flute of champagne and a cadre of at-your-ready staff.

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Girls look at Barbie dolls on display during the media preview of a Barbie-themed cafe in Taipei January 30, 2013. That Barbie is a global attraction was evident as Barbie The Dreamhouse Experience opened in South Florida this week and will debut in Germany next week. Pichi Chuang / Reuters

Barbie, the iconic figure that has long ignited the imagination of fans of all ages, is now for the first time living larger than life in South Florida, residing in a super-pink, playful, technology-driven parallel universe.

Barbie The Dreamhouse Experience opened Friday at Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise. The interactive installation of 10,000 square feet is filled with several different rooms and loads of life-sized — and even bigger — wonders.

It’s the first such Barbie Dreamhouse Experience to open worldwide, with Berlin debuting next week.

Think of it as a new version of a high-technology, multimedia Barbie.

“The media component of a dreamhouse has to be there because Barbie, at the end of the day, is ahead of her time,” said Christoph Rahofer, president of Vienna-based EMS Entertainment, which produced the Dreamhouse Experience in collaboration with the toymaker that manufactures Barbie, Mattel.

“The dreamhouse has to be ahead of its time also, in terms of how pink, how fancy, how crazy, how unexpected it can be, and that also goes for the use of some of the technology,” said Rahofer, in a telephone interview from Vienna. He used his 8-year-old daughter as his muse in thinking up the dreamhouse idea, which was developed by a creative team in Vienna.

Live interactive doll experiences moved into public venues beginning in 1998, when the first American Girl Place store opened in Chicago. Thousands of girls across the country now take their dolls to tea and hold birthday parties at 14 stores nationwide. One opened at The Falls in South Miami-Dade last October.

While Rahofer had never heard of American Girl dolls until three months ago, both are owned by Mattel, which bought American Girl in 1998, and both are now part of the new world of experiential doll-playing in South Florida.

Yet some moms say Barbies are much more financially accessible than American Girl dolls, which cost $105 on average. Barbies begin at just a few dollars.

“It’s a big financial commitment,” said Lane Kiefaber, mother of a 4-year-old daughter, of American Girl.

Since Barbie was introduced in 1959, her popularity has soared in line with the fantasy world she sparked. Barbie, whose real name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, rose to become the No. 1 doll sold. Today, according to Mattel, a Barbie doll is sold every three seconds somewhere in the world.

Yet while Barbie remains an icon to those to whom she has endeared over the years, to some, she is a sexist symbol.

In Berlin, where the dreamhouse will open in a large tent in an area nestled between a railway and old communist housing blocks, a grass-roots group of opponents has formed. The group has created a Facebook faction called Occupy Barbie Dreamhouse, which has drawn more than 1,000 supporters, according to the publication The New Age Online.

Yet Barbie gives girls hope of realizing their dreams, Rahofer said, as she has had dozens of professions over the years. “So it’s not a doll, it’s a concept, the concept of what can you achieve in life, how can you fulfill your dreams, and that is why it’s a dreamhouse,” he said.

Regardless, Barbie is no longer the doll you may have grown up with and played with alongside your friends, dressing her perfectly sculpted body in cute outfits.

Today, Barbie is all about multimedia, living in a Dreamhouse that includes LED touchscreens to make Barbie digital outfits and video screens in the pretend elevator playing “webisodes” of Barbie and her friends.

“It’s a whole new world of Barbie,” said Lisa Cassidy, 44, of Miramar, who brought her daughters, Riley, 8 and Sidney, 10. “It’s not just the doll we knew.”

Still, the Dreamhouse Experience leans on time-tested favorites, including baking and dressing up, retaining aspects of the original dreamhouse that debuted in the 1960s.

Kids can make cupcakes on a touchscreen inside the all-pink kitchen, play with huge pieces of jewelry, stand in a “glitterizer” inside Barbie’s bedroom and watch a dolphin come out her bathroom’s toilet. The experience culminates with girls getting made up and dressed up to participate in a fashion show on a catwalk, with adult “Barbie friends” instructing the girls on how to pose with their hands on their hips and blow kisses at the audience.

“Cool!” squealed a dozen girls, ages 2 to 10, as they toured the dreamhouse with their mothers on Friday.

“I think it’s awesome. It’s a girl’s dream come true,” said Michelle Sherman, 44, who brought her 4-year-old daughter, Samantha Ruby. “Who wouldn’t want to live in Barbie’s house?”

In this replica, pink abounds, from the bathtub to toilet paper, tutus, hair driers, curlers and towels. An “endless” walk-in closet even contains retro Barbie clothes and shoes, along with life-size glittery shoes and purses.

“I love it, it’s just like in all her movies,” Riley Cassidy said. “It’s really pink, so it’s awesome.”

Barbie’s Dreamhouse Experience has been in the works for 18 months, Rahofer said. The group chose South Florida for the weather, as well as for its combination of a large local community and an abundance of tourists.

Open seven days a week, the dreamhouse will remain on site, in the former Hard Rock Cafe building, until at least August 2014, Rahofer said. Individual ticket prices range from $14 to $29.99 for a VIP Megastar ticket. ___

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Tourism officials in "Southern New England" i.e. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut want to draw visitors who may have only considered Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. Pictured is Mystic Pizza, made famous by the movie of the same name, in Mystic, Connecticut. Patrick Ashley / flickr.com

People travel from all over the world to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston, see the autumn leaves turn in Vermont and New Hampshire and eat lobster in Maine. A new campaign involving tourism officials in three states to the south and west of Boston is aimed at peeling off some of those visitors and attracting new ones to a region they have dubbed “SoNew.”

A series of tours on Saturday is the first event in their effort to tie together several attractions in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut in an attempt to turn Southern New England into a national and international destination.

“If you know Southern New England, if you know the Blackstone Valley, if you know Cape Cod, if you know the area between Mystic and Newport and you linger in the borderlands between Connecticut and Rhode Island, you’ve discovered an area that is deep in history, has incredible natural beauty, beautiful natural features,” said Peter Glankoff, executive vice president at the Sea Research Foundation, which operates Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. “There’s so much to discover.”

While the six New England states are marketed nationally and internationally as a single destination, much of the attention is focused on the northern states. Glankoff and colleagues including Bob Billington, director of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council in Rhode Island, have been talking about ways to better connect their destinations.

For example, visitors interested in ocean life might not know the whaling museum in New Bedford, Mass., whale watching on Cape Cod and the Mystic Aquarium are all within a short drive of each other, said Matt Caspari of Caspari McCormick, a Delaware-based marketing firm that works with the Mystic Aquarium and who came up with the “SoNew” name.

Caspari said unifying some of the attractions by way of a coordinated campaign can help people plan their vacations. Otherwise, they may not realize how easy it is to go kayaking in the Blackstone River, visit the Newport mansions and Mystic Seaport and see Cape Cod all in one short trip.

Right now, tourists “really have to do a lot of research to connect the dots. The idea here is that it’ll allow people to connect the dots, and it will give us a recognizable geography that will attract people from far away,” Caspari said. “It will allow the visitor to make the full story without going to dozens of websites to research it themselves, and it will allow the attractions to link up to other attractions.”

Another initiative being planned is a bicycle race between Newport and Mystic, which coordinators hope to launch next year, Caspari said.

Saturday’s program, called Southern New England Discovery Tours, is an expansion of a smaller program, called Tour Rhode Island, which Billington’s group has run. He expanded it this year beyond the state’s borders as a way to take the first steps in the SoNew campaign. Thirteen different bus tours and one bicycle tour will depart Saturday morning, most leaving from Twin River casino in Lincoln, R.I.

They will visit destinations as varied as the Worcester, Mass., canal district to the Rhode Island Statehouse to “paranormal” locations in the so-called Quiet Corner of Connecticut, where the three states come together.

Billington called the bus tours the beginning of an effort to build recognition of Southern New England.

“If local people know their locale, their state and their surrounding area better, they become the ambassadors, they become the salespeople,” Billington said. “We need hundreds of people talking and chatting and Facebooking about Southern New England.”

Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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