For many years now, many big companies have been carrying on a clear reconstruction program, that leads them to forego all physical assets and focus on branding and the services that can be quickly delocalized. Anyone who has read Naomi Klein’s No Logo knows how Nike conceives its operations: selling sneakers by taking care of design and branding only. It doesn’t have a single factory and the whole production is made in southeast Asia. This tendency is coming strong on the tourism market. Starwood Company, known for being the owner of the Sheraton hotels chain, has begun to let go their real state properties -its physical assets- to focus on the management of their establishments. That is, the brand. The volumen of the operations is impressive: the selling of 38 hotels in the U.S. to the Marriott chain (20 of them of the Sheraton brand) will leave the group more than US$ 4 millions in cash.

As the company possesses over 750 hotel establishments, we’ll have to see how far will they go with the uninvestment on real estate properties process. What’s for sure is that this process will provide them an important figure to sustain its reconvertion into a management focused firm. Mostly because the numbers in the last trimester haven’t been so good, with a fall of 64% in profits, compared to the same period in 2004. Starwood claimed it’s a one time only “extraordinary charge for the remittance of utilities”; without this charge, profits would been higher than expected. And, apparently, the market is on the firm’s side, since their stock hasn’t dropped, while the sector’s average has fallen in an 8% this year. By the way, the U.S. hotel market is showing quite positive figures. There’s been a rise in prices and incomes of hotel chains, thanks to a higher demand, but at the same time, there’s been difficulties because of the successive hurricanes around Florida. Thanks to the increase of prices and demand, Starwood has informed of an incomes rise of 11.9%, achieving US$ 1500 millions.

Update: a Wall Street Journal Americas note tells the inside problems of Starwood and how the selling of hotels to the Marriott chain has worsened the situation.

The interest in alternative trekking routes to the famous Inca Trail in Cuzco is increasing. Many people are complaining how expensive it is to do this trail; while others are pointing at the excessive commercialization. For those interested in analyzing other posibilities, the english magazine Wanderlust, specialized in non conventional tourism -a little like the old Lonely Planet travel guides- dedicates a brief note to the Choquequirao trek, a path of 4 days, much harder to do than the Inca Trail, and wich also allows to access another inca city in ruins.
Wanderlust says:

Choquequirao’s mountain-top ruins are mercifully free from the hordes that visit Machu Picchu. And tours to this route are already being sold in England. Apparently, Cuzco is already diversifying.

The article can be found here.

Many times, this blog has mentioned the word “touristify”. But I never tried to define this concept. So, consider this a first attempt to define it; I’m sure it’ll have some flaws you’ll might be able to sort out with your comments and contributions.

When we say “touristify”, we refer to the process by which a historical, social or cultural fact is transformed into a valuable product within the travel market. For this, it’s necessary that this “fact” acquires certain characteristics that allow its commercialization. First of all, it’s evaluated as an opportunity of making money. How far or close it is located from other sites, what infrastructure does it have, how long would the visit last, are some of the variables. If the fact or site appears to be commercializeable, then it’s time to move to the second phase, and configure the space to allow knowing the place in a few hours or days through organized tours or formal visits that will later be actively promoted. This way, a whole chain of sales will be possible to structure for the place or fact so that guides, hotels, travel agencies, transportation, etc. can exploit it.

Of course, there are different visions of the “touristification” process. On one side, there’s those who sustain there’s a “falsification” of traditions and history of touristified locations, by replacing these by a crudely simplified version. In the end, this perspective is rather simplist, since it assumes there are “true facts” that are replaced by other “false” ones. Any constructivist perspective would discard this little comprehensive vision.

But on the tourism field side, there’s also a vision of “common sense” by which the touristification of a fact or place is not a part of a social and historical process, but rather an obvious development from a state of things in the travel market. That is, they conceive “touristifications” as something that has to take place no matter what, and not like an active process by which the Estate and the private sector promote a progressive adaptation of the location to the field’s needs.

One of the most common destinations of travellers that arrive to Argentina is Tigre, a location close to the capital Buenos Aires. In fact, you can get there in a reasonable time, thanks to the trains system service. And the most visited area at Tigre is the riverside port, which has ship departures to other sites of the local Delta (a large number of interesting islands) and Uruguay; and also the Puerto de Frutos, a big number of small businesses that sell all kinds of goods, specially crafts made of cane and wicker.

There are two ways to arrive to Tigre, both by train. On one side, you can use the traditional service, provided by Mitre trains, branch Tigre, departing from Retiro station, a few blocks away from the center of Buenos Aires. With a low cost of 0.90 pesos (US$ 0.30), the best maintained public service trains in Argentina will take you there in less than an hour. These ride through the north zone of the city and Gran Buenos Aires, the area with the country’s highest incomes. On the other side, you can combine the Mitre train, Bartolome Mitre branch, and take the Train de la Costa, a touristic service that costs, on weekends, 4 pesos for locals and 6 (US$ 2) for outsiders. The tickets allows you to get off and on the train any time you want along the way. Some interesting stops are Anchorena station, where we can access the Rio de la Plata, and Barrancas de San Isidro, with an antiques fair where you’ll find many interesting items, similar to those you find in Defensa street at San Telmo.

The TBA train schedule among Retiro and Tigre stations can be found here. The Train de la Costa has its own website.

The touristic interest on Tigre becomes clear if you consider that the local government has invested for years in the positioning of the location, through infrastructure and landscapes improvements. In the begginings of the XX century, Tigre was the destination of the wealthiest class in Argentina, who moved from their expensive homes in San Isidro. You can still find excellent examples of the architecture of those times in the Rowing Club (in front of the river terminal) and the so called Tigre Club, a huge old house with a big explanade that goes through the street and heads right into the river, a location I was lucky to visit during the times I worked as a journalist in the northern zone. More about historical houses in the Municipalidad de Tigre website.

Of course, not everything at Tigre has been “touristified”. We refer only to the area of the location’s center, around the river port, and the river’s margins. Anyways, there’s a growing private investment in the area, now that the touristic interest is increasing on the side of foreign tourists, who didn’t use to get there so frequently.

The Puerto de Frutos is an interesting locations to shop if you’re looking for handcrafts made of cane and wicker. There’s a huge variety, although with the touristification of the area, the prices have rised and the supply is becoming more complete and sofisticated. The weekends the place is completely packed with visitors and it’s a quite interesting visit that can take a few hours. Particularly, every time I went there I’ve come back home with some wood or wicker craft, cheese -I particularly like the spicy ones- and Otto Tipp red beer, now among my favorites (Otto Tipp is from the locality of El Bolson, in the argentinean Patagonia, but the truth is I don’t know any other place in Buenos Aires that carries this beer; if anyone knows, let me know in the comments). Anyways, every time it’s easier to find diverse products, even wicker baskets … made in China. Of course, the artisan spirit of the first years is slowly being lost, in the same way the fruits -particularly oranges, harvested in the Delta islands- are limited to a small part of the place.

There are good references to the destinations you can visit in this area at the Municipalidad de Tigre website. It’s an alternative to spend the day, basically, unless you’re interested in spending the night at some hotel in the Delta islands, which is not a bad option.

Some days ago, some blogs hosted in Dreamhost have been letting us know of the problems they’re having with the “high CPU consumption”. For example, at La Maté por un Yogur (spanish)and Mangas Verdes (spanish too). That is, their sites are so visited and the requests to the database are so many, they’re making the Dreamhost servers work a lot. The situation is serious because, if they don’t manage to slow down their CPU consumption, their accounts will be deactivated, unless they move to a dedicated server (that costs US$ 99 per month).

Until now, Dreamhost had been making a brilliant use of blogs as marketing tools. They gave away codes with discounts, gave comissions for every person that subscribed though our user, etc. This strategy allowed them to capture a large number of people that build blogs with tools such as Wordpress and Movable Type. But what’s going on now shows that in fact they didn’t quite understand how interaction operates in the blogosphere.

Some might say there’s only 20 or 30 blogs with these issues. They’re probably right. The problem is that, precisely, these blogs are the ones with the most readers, higher ponderation in Google and Technorati, and usually are those able to get attention.

And many bloggers have turned to analyze the flaws of the Dreamhost service. For instance, for those of us who use dynamic applications, the max time frame they fix for their CPU servers uploading, of 30 or 40 minutes per day, is not enough to consume even the 10% of the resources of disks and data transference they provide. To put it bluntly: Dreamhost can broaden the storage space every week, and give you millions of domains and databases, but in the end all of this in useless, since you won’t be able to use it. Other criticize the fact that Dreamhost uses php.cgi to process the consults (spanish), which causes a big consumption of resources. Could it be that the problem is, as Minid states, Dreamhost and not Wordpress (spanish)?

As more Dreamhost users with largely visited blogs start presenting their problems with this hosting service, their marketing strategies will die quickly. And not only that: Dreamhost is presented as a Wordpress “friendly” service, and it’s one of the recommended sites at Wordpress.org. The interesting thing is that now they’re deactivating the account to … Wordpress users. No one is saying, of course, that they have to destinate unlimited resources to a site. They have to follow an equation of profitability. But it’s noticeable how many users are having problems with this hosting. Couldn’t it be that Dreamhost is responsible of its CPU consumption for their unfortunate decisions about php.cgi? I ask, as non expert user.

Summing it up: the issue threatens to ruin a good part of Dreamhost’s marketing accomplishments, and makes the users focus on the service’s deficiencies. And they publish it in sites with many thousands of visits per day. Doesn’t look good.

This blog uses Dreamhost. Among my different sites, I might reach 1500 daily visits. Yesterday I happened to look at my consumption, and it’s around 43 minutes of CPU. So, I’m crossing the limit. How long until they send me a warning? For now, I’ve taken a few preventive measures (remove some databases, install WP-Cache in mi Wordpress blogs, among others) but we’ll see if I manage to reduce my consumtion. Anyways, I’m still below the numbers Boja shows in La Maté por un Yogur, and other more popular blogs.

By the way, if you want to follow up this topic, you can use this search at Technorati.

Update: after the measures taken yesterday, of broadening the cache time of pages with WP-Cache, eliminating some of the databases and many plugins, the consumption went down to 20 minutes of CPU use. Let’s hope it stays that way. Anyways, I think Dreamhost will have to revise this issue, before more people -their users- start paying attention to it.

Note: this entry is based on my travel experience around South America. In some cases, there are elements that can be applied to other destinations, but I can’t guarantee it

Are there ways to save money in our trips and, hence, to be able to broaden our visit with less expenses? Here, some of the backpackers’ usual practices when travelling around South America.

Spend the night in a bus. The distances between Latin American cities are usually big, in many cases over 8 hours. So, one of the ways to save money is by travelling by bus during the night, every other day. Obviously, you’ll have to take the bus somewhere around 10pm. so that you’ll arrive to your destination early in the morning, around 6 am (not earlier, if possible). The con: you’ll have to walk around the city the whole day without counting on a place where to rest or take a shower. At least in Bolivia, this last issue is not a big problem, since there are public showers (not free, but they’re cheap) in all the bus terminals. Just don’t exceed your savings impulses and do spend a night in a hotel every other day; otherwise you’ll be so tired, you won’t be able to enjoy your trip. By the way, in Bolivia it’s possible to bargain for the price of bus tickets, particularly when there are not enough passengers to fill the bus. In these cases, you can get substantial savings.

The cheapest hotels are located nearby train stations. In Latin America, trains have been an object of a long process of uninvestment and, in fact, have stopped working in many places. But even in areas where abandoned (or not) train stations are located you can usually find most of the cheapest hotels and lodges of the town. Don’t look for single rooms nor with private bathroom, you won’t save as much. The con: it’s not unusual for these locations to be unsafe. By the way: in countries like Peru or Bolivia the development of camping is minimal, and doesn’t make much sense to carry a tent around these places. Besides, in high altitude places it gets so cold at night that you’ll hardly like it to sleep outside.

Eat in the streets. Ok, maybe someone concerned about hygiene and bromatology will strongly disagree with this advice, but you have to admit that you won’t find anything cheaper, at least not in Latin America. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to gain some digestive problems and, in the case these are really bad, you’ll end up spending more money in medications than in food. Not to mention the two or three days you’ll waste by staying in the bathroom.

Buy in groups. Particularly in countries like Bolivia, Peru and Equator, it’s not hard to bargain for the prices of crafts. But it’s even better to buy in groups, and talk the price of every piece down, until you get a greater discount for the whole package. Remember, bargaining is a social relation between the buyer and the seller, not a talk between a swindler and his victim. I clear this up because I’m tired of seeing european tourists yelling at the sellers “I’ve said 20!!!!”, as if they were ordering the price. The funniest thing is that these same tourists might have already been overcharged by taxi drivers and restaurants, and they didn’t say anything…

Got any more advice? Leave it on the comments area.