As the Olympics take over Paris, the hospitality scene is expanding in the city — and beyond — with a handful of new hotel openings worth bookmarking for a visit once the crowds have died down. Le Grand Hôtel Cayré opened in the Seventh Arrondissement earlier this month with 123 rooms, all with handcrafted wooden beds and mustard yellow velvet chairs, some with balconies and views of the Sacre Coeur or Eiffel Tower. In Carry-le-Rouet, a seaside village outside of Marseille, L’Hôtel Bleu’s design follows its name with 44 harbor-view rooms decorated in shades of blue. The property’s restaurant offers three seafood-heavy, Mediterranean-inspired tasting menus, while a private cinema room can be reserved when the weather calls for some indoor time. Further east toward Cannes, in the commune of Mougins, Hôtel Le Mas Candille was recently redesigned by the architect and decorator Hugo Toro, whose hand-painted patterns appear on the curtains and carpets in the 46 rooms. Its Glow House spa has four treatment rooms, each with its own terrace, and a private swimming pool overlooking Provence. In Nice’s old town, Hôtel du Couvent opened last month within a 17th-century convent surrounded by two-and-a-half acres of gardens. The former nuns’ herbal shop has been revived and now offers personalized remedies, some made from herbs grown on the property. There’s also a bathing area with pools of varying temperatures inspired by the nearby Roman baths.
Does Columbus, Ohio Really Have 50 Million Visitors?
18.07.2024 - 21:32 / skift.com / Dawit Habtemariam
In May, Experience Columbus released its visitor data for 2023: It touted 51.2 million visitors to the region — an all-time record, the destination marketing organization for Ohio’s largest city said.
It’s a stunning claim and would mean that Columbus had the same amount of visitors as much larger cities.
“Absolutely incredible that this consulting firm paid by the city is saying more visitors came to Columbus than Chicago last year. This would be 1 out of 6 Americans visiting Columbus,” wrote Max Littman, a special investigations editor for The Rooster, an Ohiocentric blog focused on Columbus, on X.
All destinations release similar data, but there’s no standard measure for what a visitor is. For tourism boards, the metric is key: Politicians look at visitor numbers – along with other data that shows economic impact – when determining how much money to allocate to tourism promotion.
One tourism board consultant told us they have had to bend their definition of a visitor to satisfy a client.
”You can’t go to a client and say forget about half of your [visitor] spending because we define travel as 50 miles and half your spending comes from people [traveling] less than 20 miles,” said the consultant, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s mainly a tool in a toolbox of data that is used to justify funding and the political benefits of having a marketing organization.”
Here are some of the assumptions that go into Experience Columbus’ number:
(By this logic, Skift reporter Dawit Habtemariam counted as three visitors when spending a summer in Wilmington, Ohio, and driving into Columbus on separate trips to go to the farmers’ market, to see the Capitol building and to explore the city.)
In a statement, Experience Columbus defended its numbers and noted that it had never made comparisons to other destinations.
“We have shared that destinations use different reporting methods and that it’s not a simple apples-to-apples comparison. We stand by our numbers as explained throughout past communication and have used the same research partners for over a decade to have consistent benchmarking. We also utilize the same research partners as the state of Ohio, as we believe consistency across the state is critical when tracking and reporting visitation and direct visitor spend.”
Visitors to a destination drive spending at local businesses, support local jobs, and generate tax revenue.
“Every year we collect all these fees. We could decide to give them less if we decided they didn’t utilize their funding correctly,” said Daniel Rickenmann, mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, referring to the economic impact of tourism boards.
In November 2022, Orange County, Florida’s board of commissioners was discussing
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