%3Amax_bytes(150000)%3Astrip_icc()%2FTAL-playa-de-las-teresitas-spain-BLUEFLAGBEACHCNTRY0825-155a3686ee1f45b9bbab8ea614702995.jpg&w=3840&q=100)
This Country Has the Most Clean Beaches in the World—and They're All Drop-dead Gorgeous
The easiest way to find these beaches is to check out all the Blue Flag beaches of the world, a designation awarded to beaches, marinas, and tourism boats that qualify via "a series of stringent environmental, educational, safety, and accessibility criteria," which must be met and maintained to keep the flag.
The organization keeps meticulous public records of all the sites around the world that have earned the designation. While you can find them just about everywhere, Spain is home to the most blue flags, with 749 sites boasting the designation, including 642 beaches.
The beaches include the natural pools of El Caletón on the island of Tenerife, a lava beach lined with massive cliffs that make for a spectacular Instagram backdrop. There's also the more subdued Cortadura beach in the ancient port city of Cadiz, made up of soft, golden sand dunes. Here, families will find plenty of amenities, including bathrooms, showers, and concession stands, to ensure a fun-filled day.
On the island of Mallorca, travelers will also find the Cala de Sant Vicenç, a beach consisting of three smaller coves, allowing everyone to find a little peace and tranquility as they swim in the azure waters.
In Barcelona, travelers can visit Sant Sebastià, one of the city's oldest and "most traditional beaches," according to Barcelona's tourism page. It was among the first along the shoreline to have bathing amenities and now includes plenty of hotels and restaurants lining the sand, which means you can find the perfect place to eat and stay over so you can do it all again tomorrow.
But again, this is just the beginning of Spain's Blue Flag beaches. See them all at spain.info and start planning your relaxing waterside break ASAP.
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Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
How Trump's Travel Crackdown Is Hurting Americans at Home and Abroad
This is part of Reason's 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue. As the Trump administration began snatching college students, detaining legal European tourists, denying entry to British crust-punks, rejecting transgender passports, deporting tattooed Salvadorans, insulting the sovereignty of Canadians, and floating plans to ban visitors from 43 countries, the domestic travel and tourism industry braced itself for bad news. "Historical data underscores that trade and geopolitical tensions influence travel demand," warned the research firm Tourism Economics in late February. The group had previously estimated that inbound visits to the U.S. in 2025 would rise 8.8 percent over last year; now it was forecasting a 5.1 percent drop. What's more, inbound travel spending this year "could fall by 12.3 [percent], amounting to a $22 billion annual loss." Sure enough, the year-over-year foreign visitor numbers in March were brutal. Down a jaw-dropping 18.4 percent, they were led by a sharp drop-off from America's No. 1 supplier: Canada. Then came President Donald Trump's 11th week in office. On April 2, the populist president capped a lifelong enthusiasm for tariffs ("the most beautiful word in the dictionary," he has said on multiple occasions) by announcing import taxes that averaged 22 percent, the largest ratchet in U.S. history. The move came as a triple whammy to America's globe-leading $200 billion travel and tourism industry. First, as the luxury travel agent Kate Sullivan told TravelPulse, "the cost of hard goods will increase for hotels, airlines, and other industry sectors, who will likely need to increase rates and fares to cover the increases." Second, the disruptions to the global trading system will hit especially hard some of the fastest-growing sources of U.S. visitation—China, India, and Japan. And finally, the concomitant souring of overseas public opinion, particularly in regions (Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, North America) singled out for criticism by the Trump administration, is already depressing numbers. "The U.S. is not perceived as a welcoming destination," travel agency owner Marco Jahn told the Associated Press after the tariffs were announced. Americans whose incomes are not tethered to the enthusiasms of overseas visitors may have the impression that such industry turmoil will leave their own travel plans unscathed. Alas, they are mistaken. For starters, domestic hoteliers are heavily reliant on imports for furniture, especially from high-tariffed China and Vietnam. Trump's own hotels are filled with foreign-made dishware, chandeliers, and even American flags. Making goods more expensive immediately reduces Americans' discretionary spending, which is the bucket from which travel budgets are drawn. Recessions decrease vacations, sometimes sharply; after Trump's tariffs, most of the major economic forecasting agencies (Moody's, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morningstar) jacked up their expectations for an economic downturn. Consumer confidence also tracks closely with travel planning; the former was at a four-year low even before "Liberation Day" tariffs. Further losses in the stock market—as of press time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped 3 percent since Inauguration Day—would also depress demand. It gets worse for the American traveler. Over the decades, the dollar has been propped up by Washington's leadership role in global tariff reduction; now that those tables have been turned, the greenback will be less desirable as the world's backstop currency, placing downward pressure on its value (particularly if America's heretofore world-beating economy begins to sputter). The dollar in Trump's first four months slid 7 percent against the euro. American bookings to the now-more-expensive overseas were already down 13 percent this year before Trump's tariffs. It's not just cost: A mid-March Travel Weekly survey of 400 agents found that 59 percent had heard customer concern about anti-American sentiment abroad, with 22 percent reporting resultant cancellations. A YouGov poll in early March showed that not a single European country surveyed had a net positive view of the U.S., with favorability plummeting between 6 and 28 percentage points over the previous quarter. "In Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Italy, these are the lowest figures…since we began tracking this question," the pollster wrote. So Americans will be traveling domestically, right? Not so fast. Starting on May 7, a whole 17 years after it was originally supposed to happen, Americans are no longer allowed to board a commercial flight unless using a REAL ID. Except Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said, "If it's not compliant, they may be diverted to a different line, have an extra step, but people will be allowed to fly." As of April, the Transportation Security Administration was reporting that 19 percent of current travelers were passing through checkpoints without Real ID–compliant documents. That's one "papers, please" hassle; another has the potential to affect citizens who don't even board a plane. Amid his Day 1 blizzard of executive orders, Trump signed the ominous-sounding Protecting the American People Against Invasion executive order, requiring foreigners of all nationalities to register with and get fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) within 30 days of being in the country, unless they are exempted by a preexisting visa. Aimed at (and interpreted as) cracking down on resident illegal aliens, the order also affects the millions of Canadians who until now have been allowed to travel visa-free into the U.S. for up to six months. What does this have to do with U.S. citizens? Enforcement. As of April 11, according to the DHS' final rule, "An alien's willful failure or refusal to apply to register or to be fingerprinted is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 or imprisonment for up to six months, or both." Registered aliens "must at all times carry and have in their personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card," or else face a $5,000 fine or 30 days in jail. How does law enforcement determine that a human who either does not have or refuses to show identification is actually an alien? This will surely be tested in court. Not being fully free to move about the country is, regrettably, a condition that most Americans have already been living with, in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement roadside checkpoints within 100 miles of international borders (a zone that covers two-thirds of the population). And for 99 percent of us, coughing up documentation we were already carrying is a low-impact inconvenience. But millions of Americans this year will still travel in foreign lands, where they are likely to run into an iron rule of international relations: What we do to foreigners, foreigners are eventually going to do to us. Right now, U.S. passport holders can visit most of the world's countries without a visa or with a visa on arrival for up to 90 days. If the DHS gets into the habit of detaining and fingerprinting Europeans after their 30th day of vacation, you can expect that liberalism to constrict. There is precedent. In 2009, as a result of the 9/11 terror attacks, the U.S. created the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, requiring extra fees, wait times, probing questions, and machine-readable passports of visitors even from the now-43 countries in the Visa Waiver Program. The European Union responded with the European Travel Information and Authorization System, which would have been instituted years ago had Eurocrats developed technological competence in the meantime. (Current D-Day estimates are for the end of 2026.) The era of permissionless and comparatively anonymous travel is over. Trade wars are making international exchange more expensive and less fun. And even those of us who choose America and stay off planes may find ourselves asked to prove our legal status to a man with a gun. The past was another country indeed, one that many of us wish we could still visit. The post How Trump's Travel Crackdown Is Hurting Americans at Home and Abroad appeared first on Solve the daily Crossword
Forbes
10 hours ago
- Forbes
New $250 Visa Integrity Fee Will Cost US $11 Billion, Say Tourism Officials
Topline U.S. tourism officials say Congress's controversial $250 visa integrity fee will deter international visitors and cost the country nearly $11 billion in lost visitor spending and tax revenue over the next three years. Key Facts The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the new $250 visa integrity fee will bring in around $27 billion over a decade—or $2.7 billion per year—to U.S. government coffers and reduce the national debt. But a U.S. tourism official told Forbes the fee will instead cost the U.S. economy $11 billion over three years, including $9.4 billion in lost visitor spending and $1.3 billion in lost tax revenue—or about $3.6 billion per year, according to an analysis by Tourism Economics. In addition, the lost revenue will lead to losing 15,000 U.S. travel jobs, according to U.S. tourism industry estimates. How Will The $250 Fee Impact Tourism To The U.s.? The CBO based its estimate solely on the potential revenue generated by the fee itself, while the U.S. tourism industry looked at the macroeconomic impact of implementing the fee, hence the wildly different estimates. The CBO estimated that charging roughly 11 million annual visa applicants $250 apiece would rake in roughly $2.7 billion per year for the State Department. Tourism officials say Congress wrongly assumed the pricey fee would have little impact on the volume of visitation. Tourism Economics, a division of Oxford Economics, estimated that the $250-per-person fee is onerous enough to deter 5.4% of international visitors from coming to the U.S., which would translate to a drop of nearly 1 million fewer visits annually. Fewer visitors translate to less visitor spending, and in turn to lower tax revenue and job losses in the tourism industry, sending a negative ripple effect throughout the national economy. 'By longstanding tradition, the Congressional Budget Office does not incorporate macroeconomic feedback effects into its traditional cost estimates,' a CBO spokesperson told Forbes. 'We didn't specifically do a dynamic analysis of this provision.' In other words, the CBO did not factor in the potential negative economic impact from lower visitor spending, tax revenue and subsequent job cuts—key metrics used by the U.S. tourism industry and the U.S. Commerce Department to evaluate the overall value of tourism to the U.S. economy. 'I think in the minds of congressional leaders, foreign visitors don't vote, so making them pay more to help fund the [Big Beautiful] Bill wouldn't come at any political cost,' Erik Hansen, senior vice president of government relations at the U.S. Travel Association, told Forbes. 'But the problem is it comes at a huge economic cost to American businesses.' What Else Do U.s. Tourism Experts Say Congress Got Wrong? 'Congress made the mistake of assuming that this worldwide visa integrity fee would not have a big impact on visitors from countries like India or Brazil,' Hansen told Forbes. 'This is the exact type of armchair public policymaking that is going to get us into a big mess.' India, in particular, is a 'bright spot' for inbound international travel because visitation numbers have surpassed where they were in 2019, he said, while most other countries are lagging behind their pre-pandemic volume. In 2024, Indian tourists spent roughly $13.3 billion in the U.S., according to the National Travel and Tourism Office, part of the U.S. Commerce Department. 'Applying a $250 fee to a country where travel is growing is mindboggling. It will absolutely deter travel—that's what our research has found,' Hansen said. What Do International Visitors Need To Know About The Visa Integrity Fee? The fee is not actually as 'refundable' as Congress has billed it to be. As written, the Big Beautiful Bill says the State Department 'may reimburse' the fee after the visitor's visa expires, provided that the visa holder has complied with all conditions of the visa. But most visitor visas are valid for 10 years, Hansen pointed out. 'The idea that you're going to give the government money and then wait around 10 years and remember to ask for it back, even if you followed the rules, is just absolutely crazy,' he said. Indeed, to arrive at its projection, the CBO reasoned in its estimate that 'a large number of nonimmigrants would not be eligible to seek reimbursement until several years after paying the fee' so consequently only 'a small number of people would seek reimbursement.' In other words, said Hansen, 'there's a very good understanding that the refund process itself is not going to be easy, and even if it is easy, that a lot of people aren't going to seek that refund after a decade.' Another red flag: The $250 fee was inserted into the Big Beautiful Bill without a plan for processing refunds. In its analysis, the CBO wrote that 'the Department of State would need several years to implement a process for providing reimbursements.' Why Are So Many International Travelers Avoiding The U.s. This Year? In June, a World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) analysis of the economic impact of tourism in 184 countries revealed the U.S. was the only country forecast to see international visitor spending decline in 2025, which by some estimates is as much as $29 billion. The root causes of this decline, multiple studies have found, are a combination of President Trump's tariffs, travel bans, inflammatory rhetoric and harsher immigration policies, all which have created a chilling effect on visitors. 'While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the 'closed' sign,' Julia Simpson, president and CEO of WTTC, said in a statement. 'Given we're halfway through the year and we've seen these impacts, we don't know when the stiffest headwind is, but I think it does stay sustained,' Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics, told Forbes last month. 'We're generally assuming that this persists for a while and that some of it is going to persist throughout the end of the administration.' Simpson characterized the WTTC study as a 'wake-up call for the U.S. government,' adding that 'without urgent action to restore international traveler confidence, it could take several years for the U.S. just to return to pre-pandemic levels of international visitor spend.' Tangent Trump's signature spending bill contains another blow to U.S. tourism. A Senate committee led by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) slashed the budget of Brand USA, the country's public-private destination marketing organization, from $100 million to $20 million. 'This is another error that Congress has made,' Hansen said, noting that the Trump administration recommended full funding for the organization in its fiscal year 2026 budget. 'We have a big misperception problem among international visitors right now, but Congress cut funding for the one organization that's in charge of setting perceptions and sending a welcoming message about travel to the United States.'
Forbes
11 hours ago
- Forbes
How Europe's Castle Hotels Are Going Green While Keeping History Alive
Ireland's National Heritage Week kicks off on August 16, offering free entry to more than 70 normally fee-paying historic sites. The week-long celebration is a timely reminder to think about how to keep heritage alive—no small task in a country with an estimated 30,000 castles and castle ruins. But Ireland is far from unique. From the United Kingdom to France and much of Europe, castles stand as symbols of history. Each one of them is facing the challenge of preserving the past while adapting to the future. But some have found new life as hotels aligning with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council's cultural heritage criteria, which call for safeguarding historic sites while ensuring they remain relevant for future generations. Could these historic fortresses turned luxury hotels prove that preservation and sustainability can truly go hand in hand? Breaking the Myths About Historic Buildings And Sustainability One of the biggest misconceptions about historic buildings is that they can't be sustainable or meet modern needs, says Gerard Moylan, director of facilities and sustainability at Cashel Palace Hotel in County Tipperary, Ireland, in an email interview. "Many see historic buildings as inherently unsustainable, believing demolition and new construction to be greener options," he says, but adds that restoring listed properties does demand meticulous planning, specialised expertise and significant investment, which many are not willing or able to undertake. 'It is true that upgrading a historic monument is significantly more expensive than working with a newly built hotel,' said Stéphanie Gombert, owner of Château de la Treyne, a 5-star hotel in France overhanging the Dordogne river, in an email interview. However, she believes that every hotelier can make efforts toward sustainability in their own way. Hotel manager, Adriaan Bartels, points to the nearby Rock of Cashel as an example of what happens when a site is left to battle the elements on its own. In an email interview, he explained that the roof of the historic church was removed to build a 'new' church, a move that will accelerate the original structure's decay. But Bartels insists on the importance of preserving cultural heritage, pointing to Cashel Palace as proof that castle hotels can do it sustainably. Another misconception, says Dónal Cox, general manager of Lough Eske Castle in County Donegal, is that any sustainable upgrade will ruin the character of the historic building. However, "with the right expertise and sensitivity, it's entirely possible to enhance efficiency without compromising heritage value. Sustainability in these settings isn't about high-tech overhauls, but about thoughtful, incremental change," Cox said. From Ireland's castle hotels to France's châteaux, the challenge is the same. Monique Pignet, owner of Château de Candes notes in an email interview, 'In our case, Château de Candes was a love-at-first-sight moment, a spontaneous desire to restore, protect and share something beautiful. We spent six years renovating it, working hand-in-hand with over a hundred local artisans and artists.' But she adds, "Many people glamorize those who buy a château, but few realize how much work and grit go into turning them into polished gems. It is a commitment to heritage, with countless constraints and responsibilities." How Hotels Going Green While Honoring Heritage Adrian Mooney, sales director at Kilkea Castle in County Kildare, noted in an email interview that the Castle, built in 1180, is a protected structure under Irish law, meaning a designated authority must approve every change. However, "small changes can make a big difference, and we have been implementing ways to be more sustainable for years," Mooney said. One of the most impactful upgrades in Kilkea Castle has been a cutting-edge building management system that monitors heat across the property and alerts the team to any issues, saving energy and costs. He also shared plans to tap into geothermal energy, aiming to have the system in place by next fall. "Many older properties were originally designed with sustainable features such as passive ventilation, natural lighting, and thicker walls that help regulate temperature," said Raymond Duncan, group compliance, operations & procurement manager at Hasting Hotels, in an email interview. Once the palace of the Bishop of Down, Culloden Estate & Spa in Belfast, Northern Ireland (part of Hasting Hotels), channels its historic strengths into modern sustainability. Sensitive retrofitting includes a unit that generates electricity while capturing waste heat to provide thermal energy, all without altering the building's character. Going green requires creative thinking and less invasive solutions said Cox about Lough Eske Castle 'like switching to green energy suppliers, discreetly upgrading internal systems, and focusing on behavioural and operational efficiencies. These changes may not be as visible as new technology, but they make a real impact.' Fiona O'Shea Stack, health, safety, and sustainability officer at Dromoland Castle, also agreed with the above. "It is about finding solutions that respect our 500-year history without compromising progress," she said in an email interview. She pointed to a 36% reduction in food waste through a high-efficiency composter and team-wide training as a simple but impactful measure to keep the footprint of Dromoland Castle low and its grounds thriving. Cashel Palace Hotel also implemented a composting system to manage the food waste from its Michelin-starred restaurant, The Bishop's Buttery, but both Bartels and Moylan agree that the sustainability achievement they are most proud of is the installation of the Cashel Palace Beehives in partnership with Galtee Honey Farm and the Native Irish Honey Bee Society to restore the native Irish Bee to its rightful place in Ireland. This project underscores a broader truth that sustainability isn't just about energy efficiency or waste reduction. It is also about supporting environmental protection, social responsibility, and economic development within the local community. It is a philosophy shared well beyond Ireland. "Château de Candes actively supports local wine producers," said Pignet. "We even have a wine cellar on site, featuring an exclusive selection of wines from the region. At our restaurant Le Baladin, we proudly source ingredients from nearby farms and artisans, including goat cheese, mushrooms, and truffles," she added. From Ireland to France and beyond, these historic hotels prove that heritage preservation and sustainability work best as partners. By aligning with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council's cultural heritage criteria, they protect history without freezing it in time and deliver modern comfort without draining resources.
