World Tourism Blog

Paul MacLeod is a perpetually caffeinated Elvis fanatic who’s taking care of business 24-7-365 at the antebellum home he calls “Graceland Too.”

Pound on the door at any hour — seriously, it’s OK to arrive at 4 in the morning — and the 67-year-old former auto worker will escort you through his discombobulating, floor-to-ceiling collection of photos, records, figurines, cardboard cutouts, candy wrappers, clocks and other random kitsch featuring the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“I’d give my life right now if I could bring this guy back,” MacLeod says in his auctioneer’s staccato, his gray hair slicked back in a ’50s style.

MacLeod says he rarely leaves Graceland Too, sleeps only sporadically and is fueled by 24 cans of Coca-Cola a day — a claim at least partially verified by the aluminum pull-top tabs he collects in sandwich bags and the stacks of flattened red cardboard boxes on the back porch.

Graceland Too is in Holly Springs, a northern Mississippi town of 8,000. It’s a convenient stop for fans on an Elvis pilgrimage, sitting about halfway between Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Miss., and the King’s final home and resting place, the unaffiliated Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn.

Until Graceland Too became a magnet for offbeat tourism, Holly Springs was best known for its traditional — and tastefully kept — white-columned antebellum homes.

“He’s our number one attraction,” says Suzann Williams, assistant director of the local tourism bureau.

She says that people call daily wanting information about Graceland Too, and that the Japanese and the British are the largest groups of overseas visitors. MacLeod doesn’t have a telephone, but the tourism folks take him notes to let him know visitors are coming.

MacLeod is so obsessed that 36 years ago, he named his only son after the man he considers the world’s greatest entertainer and humanitarian.

“My son was born Elvis Aron Presley, with one A for Aron,” he says, noting the spelling Presley used for years. “I didn’t put the other A to his name until Vernon Presley put it on his son’s grave.”

Floors creak beneath visitors’ feet as they walk through the 157-year-old home warmed by space heaters that sit perilously close to raggedy shag carpet and stacks of papers and magazines.

For $5, visitors get to experience sensory overload, harshly lit by unshaded bulbs.

Doorways are decorated with several Elvis-patterned curtains in ’70s-era hues of turquoise and lime. There are photocopies of a newspaper with MacLeod’s all-time favorite headline: “Elvis Presley Excites Girls, Scares Critics.”

A poster-sized display in the entryway declares — sans punctuation — “The Universes Galaxys Planets Worlds Ultimate Elvis Fans.”

“My ex-wife told me, ‘Make up your mind. Either me or the Elvis collection.’ So that put an end to that,” MacLeod says with a chuckle.

MacLeod says he has owned his home since the mid-1970s, and that he’s had 368,000 visitors since he started opening it to strangers since the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Heaven help the fact-checker who’d have to verify the statistics he tosses out during his tours, which typically last an hour and a half.

Fans say the random, nonstop flow of information is part of the campy appeal.

Garreth Blackwell, a 27-year-old journalism teacher at the nearby University of Mississippi, said he has been to Graceland Too a half-dozen times and recently took his wife and three friends for a nighttime tour.

“It’s kind of hard to talk about this guy, because you come enough you hear the same things over and over again,” Blackwell says. “It kind of puts that in your mind, ‘Well, maybe this is all true.’ You don’t ever know. But it doesn’t matter because it’s a good time.”

MacLeod says that he became an Elvis fan when he was 13, and that he attended 120 Elvis concerts.

In Graceland Too, MacLeod claims to have 35,000 records and 25,000 CDs. He says he has 185,000 square inches of carpet that once was in Graceland. He constantly monitors radio and TV broadcasts and records any mention of his idol, claiming to have 31,000 videotapes and 43,000 audio recordings.

Then there’s the scrapbook filled with teensy slivers of paper — 1 million mentions, he says, of the name Elvis Presley.

“There’s my burial suit up here to come back and haunt my ex-wife,” MacLeod says, pointing to a gold number in one of the front rooms. Hard money training.

Visitors by the thousand streamed into the newest casino-resort on the Las Vegas strip early Thursday, an influx that casino officials hope will help yank Sin City from its two-year economic funk.

Fireworks and fanfare inaugurated the official launch of the Aria Resort & Casino, the 4,000-room, 61-story centerpiece of the $8.5 billion CityCenter complex. Crowds began swarming through the doors around midnight, welcomed with cheers and dozens of photographers snapping pictures. Models stood at aisleways and casino executives greeted guests, and hundreds got a preview of an Elvis-themed Cirque du Soleil show to debut in February.

“It’s beautiful,” said 73-year-old retiree Bernard Bouley of Saint Jerome, Canada, about 30 miles from Montreal.

Bouley waited for the opening with a friend in a small park outside the Crystals mall, peering inside the doors to Aria’s lobby and glancing at the colorful fountains outside the resort’s main valet.

MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren said that while many experts thought CityCenter would never open, its employees drove the company to make sure it carried through on grand design.

“It was because of (the employees) that we got here, and the promise of 12,000 people that wanted to work hard to provide for their families,” Murren told The Associated Press. “It was that promise — that we didn’t want to let them down — that got us here.”

About 5,000 VIPs began entering Aria after 6 p.m. for a gala, greeted by smiling cocktail servers with trays of Dom Perignon champagne and displays of hors d’oeuvres of caviar, seafood and other savory treats.

“This is really 21st century Las Vegas,” said architect Cesar Pelli, whose team designed Aria. “This is really setting up very high standards that will be very hard to match — but I hope they will try.”

Earlier Wednesday, CityCenter owners MGM Mirage and Dubai World thanked architects, employees and each other at a morning ceremony.

Murren, flanked by executives and employees of the Las Vegas-based company, then rang a bell used for prizefights at the MGM Grand to remotely close the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of MGM Mirage were unchanged at $10.35 Wednesday.

A Nevada gambling regulator last month likened CityCenter’s development to a 12-round boxing match, with the opening signifying its midpoint.

“I think clearly that that was the seventh-round bell. Our foe is weakening,” Murren told the AP after hammering the bell 56 times. “Our foe — the economy, the recession, the financial crisis — our opponent is now the one that’s close to its knees, and we’re just gaining momentum and gaining strength.”

As CityCenter begins operating, it’s now up to its 12,000 employees to deliver an entertaining, exciting environment that makes guest want to keep coming back, Murren said.

Aria’s rooms, along with those at CityCenter’s Mandarin Oriental and Vdara hotels, increase room capacity on the Las Vegas Strip by 8.5 percent, UBS Investment Research analyst Robin Farley said.

Murren said investors have wondered whether CityCenter would finish, and now they want to know whether it can be successful in this economy without cannibalizing its other resorts.

Like many other businesses, the Las Vegas gambling industry has been hit by the economic downturn. Casino officials are hoping the Aria with its size and glamour can help put customers back in the game.

MGM Mirage owns the most casinos on the Strip, but Murren believes CityCenter will help, not hurt, the company’s other resorts.

The room increase has competitors worried, as visitation to Las Vegas has decreased in the past two years as consumers spent less time and money traveling and gambling.

On Tuesday, a representative of the venerable Sahara hotel-casino less than three miles from CityCenter said it would shutter two of its towers until demand improves. A day earlier, Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel in downtown Las Vegas closed its 365 guest rooms and cut 100 jobs to cut costs. Hard money training.

Remember getting through an airport without removing your shoes, dumping your water bottle or showing ID?

Remember when buying plane tickets by phone was faster than using a clunky Web site with a dial-up connection?

Remember when you needed a guidebook to plan a vacation, and when you had to phone ahead to get directions?

All these things are different now, thanks to two forces that have changed travel and tourism in the last decade profoundly and forever: Terrorism and technology.

Long before Sept. 11, 2001, air passengers walked through metal detectors and had their carry-on luggage screened by X-ray. But these procedures failed to prevent the 9/11 attackers from boarding four jets with knives and box cutters.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the Transportation Security Administration was created, “the number of prohibited items doubled or tripled,” all checked bags were screened, and “the scrutiny passengers undergo was increased,” said Robert Baker, director of global security intelligence studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz.

A few months later, in December 2001, Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane by igniting explosives in his shoe. That led to barefoot passengers padding through the checkpoints. Then in August 2006, British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up aircraft using liquid explosives. That led to restrictions on liquids and gels.

Today, travelers who forget that snow globes, wine and water bottles aren’t allowed through airport checkpoints seem absurdly out of touch. And there’s little sympathy if you miss your flight because you didn’t allow enough time for security lines.

The attitude toward air travel has changed over the last decade too. Flying isn’t fun anymore. It’s just one big headache: Flight delays, lost baggage, overbooked flights, fewer onboard amenities and fees for things that used to be free.

Despite the hassles, though, Americans fly more now than they did a decade ago. U.S. air travel hit a record high in 2007 with 769.6 million passengers, 100 million more than flew in 2000. Even with the recession, more people flew in the first eight months of 2009 — 478.6 million — than in the first nine months of 2000 — 453 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Why do we take so many flights when it’s so unpleasant? Because families are spread out; jobs require travel; and relatively low ticket prices encourage it. Bureau of Transportation Statistics data comparing average domestic itinerary fares for the second quarter show that they were actually 11 percent lower in 2009, at $301, than in 2000, at $339.

Technology is the other big force that’s changed travel in the last decade. Expedia and Travelocity began accepting online bookings in 1996, but the phenomenon of using the Internet to routinely book and plan travel has exploded in the 21st century.

In 2009, for the first time, more than half of travel bookings were made online, according to Douglas Quinby of PhoCusWright, a travel industry research company. (If you’re surprised that online bookings make up only 50 percent of travel, consider this: Most group travel, most cruises, many complicated itineraries and even the majority of lodging reservations are still booked through a travel agent, by phone or in person, Quinby says.)

But the Internet’s impact on travel is not just in booking; it’s also in planning trips. Instead of buying a guidebook, today’s traveler might consult a destination Web site. To find a restaurant, you might go online to Yelp or Chowhound, or ask friends for a recommendation through Facebook or Twitter. For hotels, you might visit TripAdvisor.com, which started allowing customers to post reviews in 2001 and today has over 30 million of them.

Technology has even changed the way we drive to our destinations. MapQuest started offering directions online in 1996, the same year GM introduced Onstar. Google Maps dates to 2005. An early handheld Garmin GPS device sold for $589 in 2003; today’s Garmins start as low as $89. But you might not need one if your phone has a mapping app. Hard money training.

It took almost a decade of mental preparation before Anna Olson felt ready to edge her skis into the chasm of Corbet’s Couloir.

Since 1996, when she’d begun working at Jackson Hole (the legendary trail’s home ski resort in Wyoming), Olson had peered many times down Corbet’s opening chute—a sheer 20-foot drop down a vertical rock wall—before deciding, as most skiers do, “I don’t need to terrify myself that much.”

But one day, she finally decided to take, as she remembered, “that step into nothing.” And once she had, there was no going back.

“I think I had my eyes shut,” recalls Olson, who works in the mountain’s communications department, “and know I was screaming all the way down.” Still, once she’d arrived at the bottom in one piece, she at last understood what the fuss was about; there really was a unique exhilaration to conquering one of the world’s toughest ski runs.

To nonskiers, just the idea of standing atop a sharply pitched slope—any slope—while attached to a pair of slippery boards may seem frightening. But even among serious snowhounds, a few fast-paced spins down a gnarly black-diamond trail are often thrill enough.

For a certain sort of skier, though, the garden-variety moguls and steeps of most expert trails are just boredom on ice.

“Some people just seem to have different stuff coursing through their veins, at least once they strap on their skis,” says Samantha Berman, senior editor at SKI magazine. “I don’t know if it’s an adrenaline thing or what … but they just need something more.”

Those are the skiers, Berman says, who make pilgrimages to the world’s most famously challenging ski runs. Some get their fix catching “mandatory air” at storied crags like Corbet’s, or the tree-filled, triple-black-diamond Black Hole in Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont. Others travel overseas to tackle runs like Grand Couloir in Courchevel, France, which starts out as a terrifyingly narrow ridge followed by a sharply pitched chute. Hard money training.

Jenn Boneza remembers when the white sandy beach near the boat ramp in her hometown was wide enough for people to build sand castles.

“It really used to be a beautiful beach,” said the 35-year-old mother of two. “And now when you look at it, it’s gone.”

What’s happening to portions of the beach in Kailua — a sunny coastal suburb of Honolulu where President Barack Obama spent his last two family vacations in the islands — is being repeated around the Hawaiian Islands.

Geologists say more than 70 percent of Kauai’s beaches are eroding while Oahu has lost a quarter of its sandy shoreline. They warn the problem is only likely to get significantly worse in coming decades as global warming causes sea levels to rise more rapidly.

“It will probably have occurred to a scale that we will have only been able to save a few places and maintain beaches, and the rest are kind of a write-off,” said Dolan Eversole, a coastal geologist with the University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant program.

The loss of so many beaches is an alarming prospect for Hawaii on many levels. Many tourists come to Hawaii precisely because they want to lounge on and walk along its soft sandy shoreline. These visitors spend some $11.4 billion each year, making tourism the state’s largest employer.

Disappearing sands would also wreak havoc on the environment as many animals and plants would lose important habitats. The Hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species, gives birth and nurses pups on beaches. The green sea turtle, a threatened species, lays eggs in the sand.

Chip Fletcher, a University of Hawaii geology professor, says scientists in Hawaii haven’t yet observed an accelerated rate of sea level rise due to global warming.

Instead, the erosion the islands are experiencing now is caused by several factors including a steady historical climb in sea levels that likely dates back to the 19th century.

Other causes include storms and human actions like the construction of seawalls, jetties, and the dredging of stream mouths. Each of these human actions disrupts the natural flow of sand.

But a more rapid rise in sea levels, caused by global warming, is expected to contribute to erosion in Hawaii within decades. In 100 years, sea levels are likely to be at least 1 meter, or 3.3 feet, higher than they are now, pushing the ocean inland along coastal areas.

Fletcher says between 60 to 80 percent of the nation’s shoreline is chronically eroding. But the problem is felt particularly acutely in Hawaii because the economy and lifestyle are so dependent on healthy beaches.

The state is doing everything it can to keep the sand in Waikiki, for example, joining with hotels in the state’s tourist hub on a plan to spend between $2 million and $3 million pumping in sand from offshore.

Sam Lemmo, administrator of the state’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, says the state would need a variety of adaptation strategies for different beaches.

It would likely have to abandon hope for beaches in posh Lanikai and suburban Ewa Beach on Oahu because they’re already lined with seawalls and are badly eroded.

The same probably goes for shoreline next to highways or other critical public infrastructure, where seawalls already exist or may have to be built.

Seawalls protect individual properties from encroaching waters but they exacerbate erosion nearby by preventing waves from reaching the sand needed to replenish the beach.

For undeveloped shoreline, the state wants to make sure these areas stay pristine. This happened recently when a Florida-based developer announced plans to build luxury homes on sand dunes in Kahuku on Oahu’s North Shore. Hard money training

Italy is opening its first national museum for contemporary arts and architecture in a bid to shed its image as merely a keeper of a glorious artistic past.

The ⁈llion ($223 million) Maxxi cultural center opens Saturday, for a limited weekend run before its full-fledged opening in a few months. The museum, located in a residential area of Rome, was designed by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.

The Culture Ministry decided to build the museum in 1998, recognizing that the country that produced Giotto, Michelangelo and Bernini — the avant-garde artists of their times — must continue to promote contemporary creativity if it wants to have a cultural heritage in the future.

“It is inconceivable for this very long flow of Italian creativity to be interrupted and do without the promotion and support which, over past centuries, have generally kindled it,” said Pio Baldi, head of the foundation that runs the museum.

The center, officially called the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts, is the latest in a series of cutting-edge architectural projects to be built in the Eternal City, which is better known for its Roman ruins, Baroque basilicas and Renaissance palazzi.

Renzo Piano’s Auditorium opened in 2002, giving Rome its first major-league concert hall. More recently and controversially, Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis museum, which houses a 2,000 year-old altar, opened in 2005. Critics complained the box-like shell was a modern blot in Rome’s historic center — to some, a gas station blocks away from the Spanish Steps.

No such protests befell Hadid’s design, which is located on the grounds of a former military barracks in Rome’s Flaminio neighborhood, far from the cobblestoned streets of the center but close enough to be reached on public transport and near the new concert hall.

Hadid said she intended the space to be an “urban cultural center,” an arts campus with indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces. The building itself — a sleek, windowed box on top of a box — is made of cement walls, steel stairs and a glass roof, giving the galleries a neutral backdrop illuminated by filtered natural light.

“I see Maxxi as an immersive urban environment for the exchange of ideas, feeding the cultural vitality of the city,” she said.

Indeed, the museum is designed to be a research workshop of sorts, not just exhibiting contemporary art and architecture but incorporating contemporary design, fashion, film and advertising in a multidisciplinary cultural center. Hard money training

The number of skier visits in the state will increase by an estimated 3 percent in the 2009-10 season to about 4.1 million, the president of industry group Ski Utah said Tuesday.

That would provide a boost to a struggling state economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and mark a turnaround from last year when the economic downturn hit.

Nathan Rafferty, Ski Utah president, said recent signs of economic growth in the national economy should lead to more destination travelers vacationing in the state than last year, when skier visits declined by 6.5 percent from the record-setting previous year.

“Last season was a little different for everybody,” Rafferty said. “The economic issues that we faced last year — the timing couldn’t have been worse.”

The economic crisis started when most people normally book vacations and got worse as the season went on, he said.

Rafferty’s comments come as most of Utah’s 13 ski areas prepare to open within the next two weeks.

The lift lines started forming at Solitude Mountain Resort last week, the first to open. Solitude, like many other resorts, developed new season pass and lodging deals this year in an effort to increase visitation.

“If you’re a skier or snowboarder, you’re seeing the best deals that you’ve seen in a decade,” Rafferty said.

Last year was the first since the 2001-02 season that the state’s ski industry didn’t experience any growth, mirroring a national trend that saw skier visits nationwide decline 5.5 percent from the record 60.5 million visits the season before.

Resorts near major metropolitan areas, particularly those on the East Coast, fared better than many destination resorts in the West last season because of an uptick in lift ticket and season pass sales bought by those who live within driving distance of ski areas.

“We hope that we’re going to see some pent up demand for skiing for the West,” Rafferty said. “There were a lot of people that stayed home, traditional skiers that maybe would have traveled out to Utah or Colorado that just said ‘You know, we’re going to stay in the car. We’re going to ski somewhere in Vermont or Maine.’”

Early indications are that more people are willing to travel.

Rafferty said the Denver-based research group Mountain Travel Research Project has reported that lodging reservations in Colorado, Utah, California and British Columbia for January are up 17 percent from last year and 7 percent for February.

Ski Utah’s Web site has also seen traffic increase 9 percent compared with the same period last year. Hard money training

While much has been made of CityCenter’s difficult birth, far less attention has been paid to the design behind it. It’s a design that speaks in equal parts to the challenges of the Las Vegas Strip, the unsustainable sprawl of the Las Vegas Valley (now home to 2 million people) and a fundamental shift in American demographics.

“After 30 years of suburban flight, people are moving back into the urban core,” says Billy Vassiliadis, CEO of R&R Partners (the ad agency behind the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” campaign). “You see it in Boston and Chicago, and we’re going to see more of it in Las Vegas. People are increasingly interested in living in a place where everything they want — shopping, restaurants, entertainment — is nearby.”

And residents aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the shift to a higher-density, more pedestrian-friendly Las Vegas.

“We’ve grown so big recently that moving around has become a burden,” says Vassiliadis, who believes CityCenter represents the beginning of a trend toward more destinations within a destination: “Las Vegas is going to evolve into something like Paris [the one in France, not the one up the street] where you spend one day in one arrondissement and go to another the next day.”

“CityCenter is Las Vegas entering the 21st century,” agrees Christopher Leinberger, a professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s fundamentally different than anything else that’s been built in Las Vegas before — modern, high-density, mixed-use — but it’s following the lead of metropolitan areas around the country.” Hard money training

These are hard times for clothing-optional travelers.

Last summer, thanks to two highly-publicized incidents, naked became synonymous with crazy. In one, a passenger stripped during a US Airways flight and resisted an attendant’s efforts to cover him; in the other, a Southwest Airlines flight was forced to turn around after a male passenger went au naturel.

The American nudist community has endured other recent controversies as well, including the withdrawal of a Florida clothing-optional resort called Paradise Lakes from the American Association of Nude Resorts (AANR) after running a controversial ad campaign that violated AANR’s “family-friendly principles.”

All of this has taken a toll: The number of people who say they’re interested in what’s being called a “nakation” slipped from 11 percent in 2008 to 10 percent this year, according to the Orlando-based market research firm Y Partnership. Erich Schuttauf, AANR’s executive director, acknowledged his concerns in a recent interview.

“It is fair to say that members are traveling less and visiting clubs closer to home,” he told me, adding, “There is a lot for which we are thankful.”

With all of this happening, why would you still want to consider baring everything on your next vacation?

First a warning: A clothing-optional vacation isn’t for everyone. For example, when I posted Schuttauf’s interview on my blog, I illustrated it with what I thought was an appropriate photo of four unclothed women running into the Baltic. The picture only showed their uncovered derrieres, but the outcry from some of my readers was loud. They demanded I remove the “not-safe-for-work” image, and because I love my readers, I did. (Even if they’re prudes.)

And by way of full disclosure, no, I haven’t taken a nakation. But I’m open to it.

Here are a few reasons you might consider vacationing in the buff. Hard money training

Climbing the Statue of Liberty or catching the view from the Empire State Building are still top New York attractions but tourists are also scrambling to see where their favorite TV shows are filmed.

Whether it’s the exterior of Carrie Bradshaw’s Greenwich Village apartment in “Sex and the City” or the Bada Bing club made famous in “The Sopranos,” TV location tours are a booming business in the Big Apple.

More than 15,000 people from 40 countries have taken “The Sopranos” tour since it was launched in 2001, and at least a thousand people a week board buses to see the locations featured in “Sex and the City.”

Fans are also heading to the swanky Upper East Side of Manhattan to get a peek into the privileged lives of the teenagers in the popular TV series “Gossip Girl.”

“We keep our eyes on shows that feature New York City prominently. For ‘Sex and the City,’ people considered New York to be the fifth girl character,” said Meagan Hess, online marketing manager for On Location Tours, which conducts the tours.

“ ‘Gossip Girl’ takes place in New York City. It plays a prominent role, not only in the settings but in the shaping of the characters,” she added.

Eighty percent of the filming of “Gossip Girl,” which follows the lives of Serena, Blair, Chuck, Dan, Vanessa and Nate who are wealthy teens living in one of new New York’s richest areas, is done on the city’s streets.

“There is a lot of money that goes into the show,” said Rachel Moulton, a 25-year-old actress and guide said during a recent tour.

Launched in May, the three-hour “Gossip Girl” bus tour which runs twice a week on Friday and Sunday afternoons ferries tourists, from the U.S. and abroad, to the shops, restaurants, bars, museums and hotels featured in the show. Hard money training