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Richard Branson partner in resort, cooking school opening on NJ estate

PEAPACK-GLADSTONE, N.J. (AP) — A new luxury resort is opening on an estate in New Jersey with Sir Richard Branson as a partner.

The Natirar resort will be set in a 40-room mansion on 90 acres of a 500-acre property in Somerset County, N.J. The estate, located about 45 miles from New York City, was once owned by King Hassan II of Morocco.

The first phase of the project, the Ninety Acres Culinary Center, opens Dec. 1 with a restaurant, cooking school, wine school and working farm on 15 acres. The culinary center will support local agriculture, with some ingredients grown onsite. The restaurant will offer a New American farm-to-table menu with entrees ranging from $26 for steak to $32 for lamb. Other choices include pizzas, lobster and duck.

The resort with guest accommodations will open in the summer of 2010. Promoters are trying to build a five-star buzz, promising “a bucolic setting” that combines state-of-the-art technology, personal service and a 21st-century lifestyle with the grandeur of the past. Facilities will include guest cottages, media room, 4,000-square foot pool, tennis courts, fitness facility, croquet field and greenhouse. Guests will also be able to go horseback riding, fly-fishing or try their hand at gardening or farming.

The land, which includes waterways and woodlands, is owned by the county and public access to about 400 acres will continue for hiking, biking, jogging and picnicking.

The land for the resort is being leased to a businessman, Bob Wojtowicz, with whom Branson is partnering. Branson owns Virgin Airlines. The two men met after Wojtowicz vacationed at Branson’s Caribbean getaway, Necker Island, which gave Wojtowicz the idea to create a resort in the U.S.

The 33,000-square-foot Tudor-style estate home where the Natirar resort is based was built in 1912 for Kate Macy, an heiress, and her husband Walter G. Ladd. They named the place Natirar, which is Raritan spelled backwards. The Raritan River traverses the property. The estate was later owned for several years by the Moroccan king, who died in 1999, and was eventually purchased by Somerset County.

For more information, visit http://www.natirar.com or call 908-901-9500 to make a reservation at Ninety Acres.

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Relais and Chateaux travel association will include more urban hotels

NEW YORK (AP) — Relais & Chateaux, an association of unique luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants, is planning to include more urban hotels.

The Hotel St. Germain in Dallas, the Hotel Raphael in Rome and The Connaught in London were among 31 new properties added in November to the Relais & Chateaux collection, bringing its total membership to 475 members in 57 countries.

Until now, 95 percent of Relais & Chateaux properties have been country hotels.

“Our city hotels, like our other members, will be selected for their ability to convey a true sense of place to our guests, allowing them to recognize where they are in the world in a way that chain hotels cannot,” said Jaume Tapies, international president of Relais & Chateaux.

Relais & Chateaux is identifying additional hotels in Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago as part of the urban expansion.

In addition to the Hotel St. Germain in Dallas, the new members include one other in the U.S., Windham Hill, in West Townshend, Vt., and three more in North America: Trout Point Lodge of Nova Scotia, Canada; Esperanza, in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; and Sonora Resort in British Columbia, Canada.

Other new Relais & Chateaux members include 17 properties in Europe, two in Africa, five in Asia, one in South America, and one in Australia. Three countries, Hungary, Macao and Taiwan, are newly represented this year.

All members are listed in Relais & Chateaux’s newly published 2010 Guide, which for the first time this year includes a section dedicated to family travel with activities for children.

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Senator wants review of frequent flier mile rules

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer is calling for a federal review of complaints by consumers that they are losing millions of frequent flier miles without notice in confusing agreements.

He wants to establish industry rules for frequent flier programs that are billed as a free benefit to help attract and retain customers. There are few restrictions now on how airlines can manage and redeem the miles.

Schumer says he suspects consumers are actually paying for frequent frier programs through air fare and fees. If so, he said rules are needed to protect consumers. He’s asking the Department of Transportation to review the complaints.

“As the holiday travel season approaches, we cannot let airlines and credit card companies continue to fly off with hard-earned frequent flier miles,” Schumer said. “When a consumer accumulates valuable frequent flier miles, they should not have to constantly worry that they are going to expire with little or no notification from the airline.”

InsideFlyer magazine finds the lack of consumer protections on frequent flier miles a common concern. Complaints include miles expiring without clear notice and a frequent change in the value of the miles, according to magazine spokeswoman Michelle O’Neill.

Other complaints include confusion over how many miles can be accumulated for certain trips, O’Neill said.

Ten trillion unused frequent-flier miles worth $165 billion are in circulation now, Schumer said. But 20 percent of them may never be redeemed, he said.

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ResponsibleTravel company cancels carbon offset program

BRIGHTON, England (AP) — ResponsibleTravel.com has stopped offering a carbon offset program for travelers.

The company was one of the first travel organizations to introduce carbon offsets in 2002.

The concept involves offsetting the amount of carbon emissions created by air travel by inviting travelers to pay for the planting of trees or other actions that reduce carbon elsewhere. Carbon emissions contribute to global warming.

“We believe that the travel industry’s priority must be to reduce carbon emissions, rather than to offset,” said company founder Justin Francis in a statement on the ResponsibleTravel.com Web site. “Too often offsets are being used by the tourism industry in developed countries to justify growth plans on the basis that money will be donated to projects in developing countries.”

Francis said he agreed with a report by the organization Friends of the Earth, which called carbon offsets a “dangerous distraction” that create a “medieval pardon for us to carry on behaving in the same way or worse.”

ResponsibleTravel is instead asking travelers to fly less, take trains where possible or vacation closer to where they live, and to make lifestyle changes at home to reduce emissions. More advice and tips are available at http://www.responsibletravel.com/carboncaution.

While the organization will continue to promote tourism programs that support local economic development in destinations around the world, ResponsibleTravel is also now promoting more travel to the United Kingdom, where the company is based, and more vacation packages that do not require air travel.

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Holiday travelers waited longer to book flights

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Holiday travelers waited a little longer to book their flights this year, likely holding out for better deals and waiting to see if they would still have a job. And some aren’t going at all.

Travelocity reports that the average advance purchase fell to 55 days for Thanksgiving travel this year. That’s 2.6 days later than last year’s average.

People flying in late December — around Christmas — waited to buy until 88 days in advance, down from 96 days last year, for domestic trips. For international trips, the average purchase was made 7.5 days later, or 110 days in advance.

Travelers have been watching fares fall all year and may have bet they’d get a better deal by waiting.

Airlines have tried to raise fares by tacking on $20 surcharges for peak days around Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, some carriers ran sales that included the holiday travel periods, said Henry Harteveldt, an analyst who tracks travel at Forrester Research in San Francisco.

He said many of the hotels they survey report getting 20 percent or more of their bookings within a week of the arrival date.

Travelers “just want to make sure with full confidence that they’ll have the money to spend and that the price is right,” Harteveldt said. “Until we see meaningful improvement in the economy — jobs coming back, wages going up — the consumer is going to be very, very hesitant in buying any discretionary item.”

Travelocity said average domestic airfares fell 7 percent from a year ago, to $398 for departures between Dec. 20 and Jan. 3. International fares fell 11 percent to $793.

For hotel stays during that period, domestic rates averaged $172 per night, down 9 percent from last year. International hotel rates fell 8 percent to $221.

Maritz Research estimated that almost 1.6 million fewer people would travel during the holiday season. Its phone poll conducted between Oct. 15 and 21 found that about 23 percent of people plan to travel, down from 27 percent in 2005.

Why are people staying home? Financial concerns kept 31 percent home, while swine flu worries were a factor for another 14 percent. Another 14 percent said they or someone in their household had lost a job within the past year, according to Maritz.

Consumers planned to spend about $854 each on their trips, down from $1,251 in 2005, according to Maritz.

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Grand Canyon to change backpacker permit system

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The Grand Canyon National Park is changing the system for getting backcountry permits.

Starting Feb. 1, 2010, the park will consider only written requests for backcountry permits four months in advance of trips.

The requests can be sent in by fax, by mail or hand-delivered, but all requests received each day by 5 p.m. will then be randomly ordered by computer for consideration for permits.

The park said on its Web site that the procedural change means applicants “will no longer be able to walk in and have their requests receive immediate consideration.”

The old system was perceived as giving locals and those with the means to travel to the park to submit their requests an advantage over those trying to fax requests in.

The earliest you can get a backcountry permit for the canyon is four months in advance of a trip, so under the new system, the first day a request can be submitted in writing for a trip taking place in June would be Feb. 1, according to the park Web site.

The Arizona Daily Sun reported that one out of every two people who seeks permission to camp most places below the rim is denied because space is limited and there are so many applications.

Eventually the park plans to move to an online reservation system. Also, the Park Service is not allowing any more individuals to establish commercial backpacking businesses until the agency sorts out a larger plan for the backcountry.

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Charlie Chaplin museum planned for Switzerland

GENEVA (AP) — Charlie Chaplin’s last home in Switzerland will be turned into a permanent place of pilgrimage for fans of the actor who immortalized the “Little Tramp,” one of his sons said.

The mansion at Corsier-sur-Vevey by the shores of Lake Geneva was chosen over Los Angeles and London as the site of the first museum dedicated to the screen legend, said Michael Chaplin.

The museum has been a decade in the planning and will be finished within two years, he said. It will feature objects from Chaplin’s life and displays chronicling his rise from the music halls of his native London to stardom in Hollywood’s silent movie era and beyond.

“He was very happy here because he had a family life,” Michael Chaplin said of the vintner’s chateau where his father lived for more than 20 years and raised eight children until his death in 1977.

The actor whose film classics include “The Immigrant,” “City Lights” and “The Great Dictator,” was barred from the United Stated in 1952 during the peak of McCarthyism over suspicions he harbored communist sympathies. He returned briefly two decades later to receive an honorary Academy Award for his life work.

The mansion, with its extensive gardens and woodland area, was home to brothers Michael and Eugene Chaplin, and their families for over 10 years.

“All the time we were here we had people coming to the door asking if they could walk around,” said Michael, 63, the actor’s fifth of 11 children. “Sometimes whole buses would come and we’d open up the gate to let them walk around the park. That put the seed of the idea in our minds that when we left it should become a museum.”

But neighbors opposed to the plan, and it languished in local politics for years before authorities accepted the $50 million project. The actor’s son credited chocolate maker Nestle, which is based nearby, with helping to get approval.

He said the old wine cellars with their vaulted ceilings will be used to evoke the Victorian-era London of Chaplin’s youth. Hollywood will be recreated in the form of film sets in two annex buildings, with a giant recreation of the machine from “Modern Times” that Chaplin used to portray the desperation of factory workers.

The displays will also include footage from his movies and holographic narrators.

The main building will feature his father’s library, the piano at which he composed film scores and a desk where he wrote his autobiography and scripts for two of his movies.

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Opening of Sleeping Giant Ski Area in Wyoming delayed

CODY, Wyo. (AP) — A lack of snow and delays in construction of a new chair lift has pushed back the opening of the Sleeping Giant Ski Area one week to Dec. 4.

Work crews for more than a year have been overhauling the ski area with the goal of having it open for Thanksgiving weekend.

The ski area’s east chair lift is ready, but work continues on the new west chair, according to the Casper Star-Tribune.

The ski area is located a few miles from the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Park County commissioners recently allocated $38,000 in federal forest reserve money to the nonprofit ski area in the Shoshone National Forest to clear dead trees.

But commissioners rejected a request for a liquor license for the ski area.

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Art Basel in Miami, Dec. 3-6

MIAMI (AP) — Art Basel in Miami Beach, the international art show and sister event to Art Basel in Switzerland, will take place Dec. 3-6.

More than 250 galleries from around the world will take part in the show, exhibiting 20th and 21st century art from over 2,000 artists. Exhibition sites are located in the city’s Art Deco District.

One-day tickets, available from Ticketmaster, are $35, $55 for two days and $75 for a pass to the entire event. Students and seniors are $20, kids under 16 are free when accompanied by an adult.

Details at http://www.artbaselmiamibeach.com.

Special exhibitions will feature performance art, public art and video art.

Parties and crossover events for music, film and design will take place in conjunction with Art Basel. Graffiti Gone Global will look at street art around the world in a 4,000-square-foot venue in the Midtown Arts District at 3252 NE First Ave. Details at http://www.graffitigoneglobal.blogspot.com

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Holiday tours of Wisconsin governor’s mansion set

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The governor’s mansion in Maple Bluff will be open to the public seven days in December for holiday tours.

The first 30-minute tours are Dec. 9 and they end Dec. 19.

Each tour includes a brief history of the executive residence, which is decorated with six Wisconsin-themed trees.

One is a tribute to the troops, another showcases the state’s biotech companies and another highlights family farms. Another represents Nigerian heritage in Wisconsin, one celebrates the diversity of the state’s 72 counties and another features ornaments made by fourth graders based on their favorite holiday movies.

While the tours are free, participants are asked to donate a children’s book which will be distributed to literacy organizations.

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