A Beautiful Vision Of An American High-Speed Rail Map
Imagine if the country was linked by a network of 220-mile-per-hour trains.
Google’s Expanded Travel Info Revamps Marketer Landscape - eMarketer
Google’s Hotel Finder and Flight Search have fundamentally altered what travel consumers see above the fold on search engine results pages (SERPs). Travel researchers who search potential flight destinations or hotel accommodations will no longer see 10 blue links immediately below the top-of-page paid search ads…
Google’s redistribution of search traffic renders what previously passed as “SEO” basically meaningless. Integrating all travel marketing content—not just planting SEO and pay-per-click keywords—is becoming much more important.
National Geographic Photo Contest 2012
Yosemite Valley at Dusk: A mist had settled over Yosemite Valley, as automobiles passed through, headlights illuminated the fog.
"Travel is like a good, challenging book: it demands presentness—the ability to live completely in the moment, absorbed in the words or vision of reality before you. And like serious reading itself, travel has become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age."
A Trampoline Bridge For Bouncing Across Paris’s River Seine | Co.Design
Bridges can be destinations in and of themselves. “Think about the lovely Pont Neuf or Pont des Arts… In Paris, you don’t just cross a bridge … you admire the city from the bridge.”
"There is now one Airbnb listing for every six hotel rooms in New York City alone."
- From Airbnb to Coursera: Government Shouldn’t Regulate the Sharing Economy
China’s newest tourist attraction… a glass-bottomed walkway around a cliff face
On one side a sheer rock face, on the other a 4,000ft drop - and all to separate the brave traveller from a deadly plunge is a 3ft-wide, 2.5in thick walkway. Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie, China.
Satellite Of Love: Why Virgin Galactic’s New Private Launcher Is So Swoon-Worthy
LauncherOne leverages the expertise that Virgin Galactic has been building up with its space tourism business… it uses exactly the same air-launched model for the rocket, with a carrier aircraft lifting the spacecraft high into the atmosphere before dropping it and letting its engines fire it into space. LauncherOne actually employs the same WhiteKnightTwo launch aircraft used for the space tourism flights—which is a proven, existing airframe that instantly reduces costs.
The upshot of all of this cost-saving is that according to Virgin, a LauncherOne vehicle can put 500 pounds of payload into orbit for “below $10 million.” That works out cheaper than its likely biggest competitor Orbital’s Pegasus XL—another air-launched vehicle—and Virgin intends it to be able to reach the “world’s lowest prices” for launches.
The World’s Tallest Treehouse - 10 stories, 6 oak trees
"Freedom from distraction may in fact be the new, sought after bourgeois luxury. In… “The Joy of Quiet,” Pico Iyer says that the future of travel lies in “black hole resorts” where you pay exorbitant amounts for remote beautiful rooms that are offline. The principle is that freedom from the Internet is so rare and exotic and impossible that it is becoming a commodity: It’s not iPhones or iPads we have to worry about buying, but peace from them. Freedom, then, is a poor man’s fabulous hotel room on a cliff on a beach without wireless."
I cannot think of a better use for Foursquare lists than Anthony Bourdain’s new show The Layover:
Ruinous Startup Airbnb Will Expand Its Failure Division
Airbnb, a website for renting your apartment to to tourist meth heads, has announced plans for a big expansion. Which is funny, because less than a month ago Airbnb was profusely apologizing for failing to protect customers, return phone calls or even blog properly. It must be time to lean in to the failure.
(The Onion could have written this!)
$99 billion Bering Strait tunnel ‘approved’: Kremlin paves way for East to West rail link
…Booking a ticket from Grand Central to St Pancras Station could be a step closer after Russia gave the green light for plans for a 65-mile tunnel under the Bering Strait.
The Kremlin this week gave its support for a $99 billion scheme that would link Asia and North America and allow for a potential once-in-a-lifetime train journey.
» via Mail Online
