WHERE ARE WE GOING?
NYPT knows the answer, thanks to a study we did. And by study, we mean asking other people what they found in the course of their research efforts.
A city that popped up consistently in discussions was Miami. In recent decades, it’s gone from dead, raised from the dead, dead again and now back to life and maturing at rapid speed. In the past year or so, expensive new hotels have opened and half a dozen more are coming soon. Among them is Andre Balazs’ Standard, located in the old Lido along the Venetian causeway. We visited the site this past week, and its safe to say that Miami Beach hasn’t seen anything like it before.
According to Expedia.com, Miami and Fort Lauderdale are No. 3 and No. 4 out of the top 10 destinations New Yorkers are booking for late fall. They come in, not surprisingly, behind Orlando (No. 1) and its grownup cousin, Las Vegas.
Number five is San Juan followed, in order, by Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Chicago and Florida’s St. Petersburg.
Fare-compare engine Sidestep.com reported to us as well that Florida is hot, as are Aruba and Cancun.
Sidestep spokesperson David Cumpston told us that “the overall trend in 2004 appears to be that New Yorkers are staying closer to home this fall – longer-distance travel to the western U.S. or Europe has fallen off.”
And over at Cheaptickets.com, we learned that domestic travel from New York is up 81 percent from last year. Its top-10 it destinations booked mirror Expedia’s pretty closely, with Orlando and Las Vegas in the top spots, followed by Ft.Lauderdale. Internationally, the top five are as follows (in order from one to five):London, Cancun, Cabo, Paris and Rome.
Founder and publisher of the exclusive Nota Bene guides, Anthony Lassman, believes Miami has a lot to offer, but also points out that Palm Springs is due for a comeback with the younger set. In fact, Lassman predicts that “anything that was popular in the mid-latter part of the last century, particularly where there are some interesting retro properties, will make a comeback.”
ALL IS VANITY
PERIOD piece “Vanity Fair” opens Sept. 1, which means the cast is milling around Manhattan doing their bit for the flick. As usual, we were curious to know about the location shoots (apparently, the ancient city of Bath stood in for London).
Reese Witherspoon (above, left) loved Rajasthan – “Beautiful!” – and then got sidetracked talking about London, where she spends lots of time. While the British media reported not too long ago that Witherspoon and husband
Ryan Phillippe were buying a house across the Pond, the actress told us that they “usually rent – Kensington, Notting Hill, all over the place.”
MEOW!
WHICH aristocratic New England harbor town is picking a fight with its more popular island neighbor, located across the state line? Seems the former’s trying to convince travel media that the latter is on its way out. In an e-mail sent to NYPT, its publicist stated that the island competitor’s “once great shopping district is . . . looking more like Wildwood, N.J., every day.” . . . We always enjoy catching hypocrites in the act, and this week, a certain bloated hotel group and certain travel Web sites are going head to head. The hotel group is saying the latter misleads consumers, but the chain’s luxury (and we use the term loosely) brand often fails to deliver on what it promises.
CORRECT, SIR!
DUE to a production error, the captions in last week’s shark stories misidentified two different species of shark. What was labeled a great white was actually a sand tiger shark, and what was classified as a whale shark was actually an aislings. NYPT pledges to be more culturally sensitive in the future. (Just because we think all sharks look alike, doesn’t mean they are.)
Ticker
OY VEY: Beleaguered airline US Air will cut special meals, including kosher ones, from all Western Hemisphere flights as of Sept. 1.