What are the best cities to live in the world? InterNations—the largest global community for people who live and work abroad—has just released its annual Expat City Ranking, a report on the best places to live in 2023.
01.11.2023 - 09:25 / nytimes.com
For her family vacation next year, Liz Thimm has booked a 10-day trip to Bocas del Toro, Panama, in February. She requested time off from her pharmacist job a year in advance, checked out guidebooks from the library and has shared itinerary ideas with her daughter and son — who are 11 and 9 — to involve them in the planning process. One thing she has not and will not do? Schedule the trip around a school vacation.
Much of Ms. Thimm’s approach to planning comes from the high costs and time constraints endured during a spring-break vacation the family, who lives in Wauwatosa, Wis., took to Puerto Rico in 2019.
“We paid $2,260 for four seats, had a six-hour layover on the way there and a 2:15 a.m. departure on the way home,” she said. “And those were the cheapest tickets we could find.”
Taking a trip during the off-season traditionally offers travelers fewer crowds and reduced fares and has long been considered a boon for budget-conscious planners. This trend is all the more pressing as the appeal of a traditional summer vacation has diminished, particularly after this year’s hot, crowded, expensive and natural-disaster-filled season.
But can families with school-aged children take advantage? While tacking on a day or two before or after winter and spring break has been a relatively normal occurrence for some families, now some well-off parents, emboldened by the rise of remote work and schooling in the pandemic and fed up with the record-breaking high prices of peak-season travel, are saying yes.
“People are feeling more freedom to be flexible,” said Natalie Kurtzman, a travel adviser with Fora Travel in Boston, noting that many of her clients with families are increasingly comfortable extending school breaks, and skipping a few days of classes in the process, to avoid high airfare prices that tend to appear during vacation periods.
“You can see that parents are becoming more and more brazen about doing it,” said Karen Rosenblum, the founder of the Spain Less Traveled travel agency.
But teachers and school administrators worry about ramifications, like students falling behind in schoolwork, and the mixed messages that the practice of skipping school might send.
“I feel like education is a privilege, and some students see it as a burden,” said Joanne Davi, a middle school teacher at St. Peter Martyr School in Pittsburg, Calif., who has noticed a major uptick in students missing school to travel since the pandemic. “When you make choices over school, that often translates to how students make choices during the day.”
Not all families in the United States are ditching school. This year, in its U.S. Family Travel Survey, the Family Travel Association noted that summer and spring vacations remain the most
What are the best cities to live in the world? InterNations—the largest global community for people who live and work abroad—has just released its annual Expat City Ranking, a report on the best places to live in 2023.
The beautiful winning images of the 2023 international Nature Photographer of the Year contest celebrating the beauty of nature photography were unveiled at an awards ceremony that took place at the annual Nature Talks Photo Festival in the Netherlands.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kelsey Frampton, a 21-year-old business student from Fresno, California, who's studying in Barcelona. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
On my first day in Iceland, I paid 2,690 ISK, or about $20, for a piece of avocado toast at the Blue Lagoon.
This is part of our global guide to the Best Places to Go in 2024—find more travel inspiration here.
This is part of our global guide to the Best Places to Go in 2024—find more travel inspiration here.
The Cycladic island of Ios is a rocky, mountainous environment of winding roads sometimes blocked by herds of bleating goats and sleepy villages hugging cerulean coastlines. In the 1960s, backpackers discovered the nearly untouched island and it became known as a hippie haven, hosting all-night beach parties, with a handful of cheap bars operating in the Chora (main town). A few decades later, nearby Santorini and Mykonos began to outshine their neighbor, attracting hordes of tourists each summer and investing in new developments. Meanwhile, Ios only got electricity across the entire island in the 1970s and most residents here are goat herders or farmers. Today, Mykonos has taken the nightlife crown and both it and Santorini have become severely over-touristed. Ios on the other hand, remains a quiet, mostly undeveloped paradise.
The travel experts at Bounce analyzed the world’s landmarks on a variety of factors including annual visitor numbers, entry prices, TripAdvisor ratings, and Instagram posts, to reveal the world’s most loved landmarks.
In June 2021, I left the US and boarded a plane to Europe to look for a place to call home.
The strong earthquake swarm that started this week near Grindavik on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula is caused by magma forming a dike - a vertical fissure-shaped intrusion at shallow depth, which allows the magma to rise and get closer to an eruption. This now threatens one of Iceland's most important tourism regions and is home to the iconic Blue Lagoon Resort. Civil Protection just declared a Level Orange emergency, and residents of Grindavík were told to evacuate.
Girl dinner doesn’t have to be basic. And if you know someone who indulges in girl dinner on a regular basis, this gift guide will help them make the most of doing the least, deliciously of course. Whether it’s specialty tinned fish, internationally sourced snacks, gourmet pasta or dishware that make girl dinner feel gourmet, these girl dinner gifts from around the world elevate the humble meal to a truly gift-worthy occasion.
With a new year approaching and new resolutions in mind, learning a language is one of those items that often appears on many personal lists. Travel experts and language institutions regularly publish surveys on the best destinations to do so, echoing the simple fact that in our interconnected, “globalized” world, the ability to communicate in more than one language opens new opportunities, experiences and understanding.