World Tourism Blog

The world’s largest cruise liner on Friday began its maiden voyage to Florida, gliding out from a shipyard in Finland with an amphitheater, basketball courts and an ice rink on board.

The 16-deck Oasis of the Seas spans 1,200 feet (360 meters) from bow to stern. Its 2,700 cabins can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,100 crew.

Commissioned by Royal Caribbean International, the ship cost $1.5 billion and took two and a half years to build at the STX Finland Oy shipyard in Turku, southwestern Finland.

The liner has four swimming pools, volleyball and basketball courts, and a youth zone with theme parks and nurseries for children. There is also an ice rink that seats 780 spectators and a small-scale golf course.

It features various “neighborhoods” — parks, squares and arenas with special themes. One of them will be a tropical environment, including palm trees and vines among the total 12,000 plants on board. They will be planted after the ship arrives in Fort Lauderdale. Hard money training

The travel industry is working to redefine itself as a key player in the American economy by showing how it helps companies improve profits, serves as a source of tax revenue and provides jobs.

Geoff Freeman, U.S. Travel Association senior vice president, said factors that include the recession, a spurt of public anger over extravagant business travel and politicians who lashed out at the travel industry resulted in $2 billion worth of events and meetings being canceled when the rancor was at its peak early this year.

If over the years the industry had done a better job of articulating why it is a vital economic force, the damage likely would not have been so great, Freeman said Tuesday at a national marketing forum organized by the association.

“We had left ourselves exposed, terribly exposed. We were the folks that were an easy target,” Freeman said.

Steve Moore, president and CEO of the Greater Phoenix Convention and Visitors Bureau, said hospitality groups focus too much on hotel and meal taxes, when they should tout their economic impact, including sales taxes and property taxes they bring communities.

The convention business can do more to paint a picture of the people who work in the industry and note that travelers don’t drain city services, Moore said.

Citing research by Oxford Economics, a consulting firm that collaborates with Oxford University’s business college, Freeman said that for every dollar companies spend on business travel, they get an average of $12.50 in revenue and $3.80 in profit.

Christine Duffy, president and CEO of Maritz Travel Co., a corporate meeting organizer, said meetings are a tool for keeping “employees engaged and motivated.” Hard money training

For true vampire devotees, a must-see is country’s Transylvania region. One of the most authentic locations is Bran Castle (a.k.a. Dracula’s Castle), Dracula’s birthplace, Sighisoara, and Dracula’s burial grounds at the Snagov Monastery are also popular sites, especially during Halloween time.

Even before Bela Lugosi muttered those infamous words “I never drink … wine” in his 1920s stage and film versions of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” vampires have been ingrained in our culture. Never more than now.

Writers Anne Rice and Stephen King helped keep vampires alive and recent TV shows, movies and books like “True Blood” and “Twilight” have introduced vampires to a whole new generation.

Indeed, tour groups around the world are helping the vampire imagery come to life with excursions to a number of eerie places — from the legendary Bran Castle (a.k.a Dracula’s Castle) in Romania to historic vampire haunts in New Orleans. Even the small town of Forks, Wash., has become flooded with “Twilight”-crazed fans hoping to catch a glimpse of locations made popular by the sexy teen vampires. Hard money training

Many travelers still rely on comprehensive printed guidebooks for tourism information. But travelers are also increasingly using mobile technology to plan a trip or find their way around.

Now a technology called QR codes, for Quick Response, offers a way to forge a functional relationship between your guidebook and your smart phone. The codes are already big in Japan, but relatively unknown in the U.S.

QR codes are essentially barcodes that can be scanned by smart phone cameras and other devices. You aim your camera at a QR code on a page in a travel book, for example, and it links to information online, such as a map or directions based on the user’s location. The user can also store information in the phone about the place that’s described on the page.

QR codes can also appear in media other than books. You can scan them off a computer screen. They’ve been put on T-shirts and even billboards.

A new travel book is using QR codes to help readers link to spots around the globe. “Earthbound: A Rough Guide to the World in Pictures” ($30) is a coffee-table book with more than 250 gorgeous photos from all over the world. Each comes with personal insights from the photographer who captured the image, some of which have never before been published.

What’s new in “Earthbound” is the strange black-and-white box next to each image. This is the QR code, looking something like a pixelated alien from the 1970s video game “Space Invaders.” The code offers a link to the location of what’s pictured in the photo, using Google Maps online. Hard money training

Just two hours from Ica, 50 square km of desert floor were covered centuries ago by vast drawings, figures of mammals, insects and deities. The Nazca Lines, discovered in 1927, are the most extraordinary legacy left by a culture that flourished in 300 BC. The lines are a series of complex designs, some up to 300 meters long which can only be seen in their true dimension from the sky, from an altitude of at least 1,500 feet. The Nazca culture is not believed to have been capable of manned flight. But the question remains as to how they crafted the drawings, what technology they used and what purpose the lines served.

The town of Nazca was founded in 1591 by the Spaniards, on the valley of Nazca, close to towns inhabited by old civilizations that had been dominated by the Inca. The ancestral name was Nanasca.

Nazca, is a gentle town, slowly developing; in which its main economic activity is based on the agriculture and the trade.

Tourism to this area is related directly with the Nazca Lines and other archaeological complex as Cahuachi, Estaquería, Chauchilla cemetery and Paredones. In the city you will be able to find many ceramic artisans whose style remembers to their ancestor. Nazca has comfortable hotels, restaurants, banks, Internet cabins, and an aerodrome. Hard money training

The glories of Istanbul have arrived in Paris.

From white marble statues of Greek and Roman gods to gleaming medieval Christian icons to a huge red Ottoman tent, an exhibition devoted to Istanbul seeks to expand French awareness of the city’s multicultural heritage in a country deeply skeptical of Turkey’s European aspirations.

Some 300 works of art from museums in 14 countries in Europe, Turkey and Qatar cap two years of work to create the exhibit “From Byzantium to Istanbul” at the Grand Palais. Some of the pieces from Turkish museums have left their country for the first time.

Bathed in subdued red light, the exhibition takes the visitor through 8,000 years of history of the “city of a hundred names” known as Byzantium, then Constantinople and now Istanbul. It focuses on its role linking Europe and Asia as “one port for two continents.”

The exhibition, opened this month by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Turkish President Abdullah Gul, is the centerpiece of the “Year of Turkey,” a panoply of some 400 Turkish cultural events over nine months offering everyone a chance to become better acquainted with Turkey’s culture.

“(Istanbul) always has been a multicultural city, with many different languages, ethnicities, religions,” said Nazan Olcer, director of the Sakip Sanci Museum in Istanbul and curator of the exhibition.

“I wanted to bring also this colorful face of the city to the exhibition. Maybe, you know, you cannot change all the prejudices with one exhibition only, but at least you can try to open a window to the visitor, to ask him to think differently,” she told The Associated Press in an interview.

Olcer says she has collaborated on many international exhibitions that included art from Turkey. Some had focused just on Ottoman art, some on different periods of Turkish art and sometimes just one period of the Turks.

The decision to extend the time span and to focus on Istanbul gives the visitor insight into the array of cultures that have shaped the city, as well as its major role as capital of the Christian Byzantine and the Islamic Ottoman empires. Hard money training

A posh Bermuda resort named one of the world’s top 500 hotels this year will close its century-old main building because the economic crisis has sapped tourism to the island.

Elbow Beach Hotel will lay off about 160 employees by the end of November as it shutters 131 rooms and outsources food and beverage services, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group spokeswoman Danielle DeVoe said Wednesday.

“It’s fair to say that current business levels are challenging globally,” she said.

The hotel’s 1908 pastel-yellow building will remain closed for several years. Hotel officials hope to renovate it during that time, although no details have been specified, DeVoe said.

Premier Ewart Brown said he hopes the projected renovation will enable Elbow Beach to compete with other high-end brands.

“The closure of any hotel property is difficult at any time,” he said. “We never want to see Bermudians losing their jobs.”

Elbow Beach will still operate 98 luxury suites and cottages, said Frank Stocek, the hotel’s general manager.

The resort made its debut on Travel + Leisure magazine’s list of the world’s top 500 hotels this year. Mandarin Oriental has managed it since 2000. Rates range from $300 to more than $800 a night.

Bermuda, a British territory several hundred miles northeast of Florida, has seen a nearly 20 percent drop in tourists through June, compared to the same period last year, according to the Caribbean Tourism Organization. Hard money training

The Bill Clinton First Home Museum will soon be a part of the National Park system, a designation that will give the modest structure on a busy street more visibility as a tourist destination.

The two-story, wood frame house on Hervey Street in Hope, Ark., was where Clinton lived from his birth in 1946 at Julia Chester Hospital until age 4. The home was occupied until it was acquired by the Clinton Birthplace Foundation during Clinton’s presidency.

The dwelling, which opened as a museum in 1997, conveys a lived-in feeling and is furnished with items that date to the late 1940s when Clinton lived there. A separate visitors center with a gift shop was added later.

The South Hervey Street home served as the center of Clinton’s family life for his first 10 years. After moving, Clinton spent summers there, visited on weekends and attended other family gatherings there until his grandfather, Eldridge Cassidy, died in 1956.

The one original piece of furniture from Clinton’s time in the house is the living room couch. While visitors are not permitted to touch or sit on the furniture, the home has no glass partitions or roped-off areas, thus preserving the ambiance of a private home.

Museum director Martha Berryman says the people around Clinton provided him with his first notions of “social justice,” a theme he carried through his political life and into his post-presidential work. Hard money training

Sachertorte. Magnificent palaces. Splendid museums. When Phillip Kalantirsky had his fill of Vienna the Opulent, he stayed on for a taste of Vienna Noir — in a walking tour built around the cult film “The Third Man.”

“I’m obsessed with the movie,” the 37-year-old lawyer from New York said on a recent afternoon as he and his wife waited for the tour to start. “Most old films are very dated, you don’t buy into them. ‘The Third Man’ is different.”

Kalantirsky’s fascination with the film — set and partly shot in postwar Vienna — is shared by many. Six decades after “The Third Man” premiered in London in September 1949, tourists from around the world pound the Austrian capital’s pavements — and even slip into its sewers — to see where the much-acclaimed motion picture was set. Fans can choose from the walking tour or the underground tour, visit a museum devoted to the movie, or even watch it in a theater.

Starring Orson Welles, the film tells the story of Holly Martins, a naive and broke American writer who investigates what appears to be the mysterious death of his old friend, Harry Lime, in a Vienna replete with rubble and racketeers, divided into zones run by the Western allies and the Soviet Union. Before long, he discovers that Lime is not dead but rather wrapped up in the trafficking of stolen, diluted penicillin, a scheme that has crippled and killed children.

Based on a screenplay by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed, the film is set to haunting Viennese zither music that’s instantly familiar yet also unsettling — the perfect accompaniment for film noir.

While “The Third Man” won an Oscar and grand prize of the Cannes Film Festival, it was less of a hit in Vienna, with locals unappreciative of the portrayal of the city’s residents as grasping and cowardly. But with “The Third Man” wildly popular elsewhere, the Austrian capital now offers an array of attractions based on the movie. Hard money training

The Overseas Highway, which stretches over 127 miles in the Florida Keys, has been named an All-American Road.

Completed in 1938, the Overseas Highway incorporates 42 bridges over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The All-American Road designation is the highest recognition possible under the National Scenic Byways program.

Only 30 other U.S. roadways have earned the prestigious title. Keys officials expect the accolade will lead to increased tourism and additional highway funding.

“The All-American Road designation will bring status to us with international and domestic visitors, so that they know driving U.S. 1 from Key Largo to Key West is a one-of-a-kind driving experience,” said Judy Hull, president of the Florida Keys Scenic Corridor Alliance, which spearheaded a multiyear effort to achieve the distinction. “It should help us with tourism and future highway grant funding.”

The Overseas Highway follows a trail originally blazed in 1912 when Standard Oil millionaire Henry Flagler completed the extension of his Florida East Coast Railroad from Miami to Key West. Construction of the highway began after the railroad ceased operating following a 1935 hurricane.

In 1982, 37 of the original bridges including the Seven Mile Bridge were replaced with wider spans. Most of the historic bridges still stand alongside the newer ones and now serve as fishing piers for anglers.

Along with the Overseas Highway, officials announced four other All-American Roads. They are Historic Route 66 in Arizona, Maine’s Acadia All-American Road Trenton Extension, the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway in Maryland and Michigan’s Woodward Avenue (M-1) Automotive Heritage Trail. Hard money training