Family history is inspiring vacations in 'roots travel' trend as industry experts weigh in
The travel trend known as "roots travel" is picking up momentum and increasing the number of tourist visits to European countries, according to experts.
Kristin Petersen, travel adviser for Travelmation, told Fox News Digital, "There's something really beautiful about feeling directly connected to a place you have never been, but you know the whispers of your past are still there."
In Scotland, at least 40 million travelers from across the globe visited to "lay claim to Scottish ancestry," according to Visit Scotland, the country's official tourism site.
"The explosion in DNA-based ancestry … [has] brought Scots ancestry to the fore like never before," the site says.
Petersen said that after doing extensive heritage research, her own family embarked on a trip to Scotland.
"It is certainly something we will never forget, and we are so grateful it will now be passed down to the next generation through our children," she said.
Petersen said a highlight of her trip was finding the location where her husband's great, great, great-grandparents were married.
"Many ancestral visitors report that the minute they set foot on Scottish soil, they feel a real emotional connection. They feel a sense of 'belonging' or even a feeling of 'coming home," according to Visit Scotland.
Italy declared 2024 the "Year of Italian Roots in the World," drawing visitors of Italian descent.
"By working side by side with those who are committed to their local area that it is possible to best promote Italian excellence and strengthen ties with our compatriots around the world," said Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani in a statement at the time.
"Over 80 million people share a strong bond with Italy, as well as with the places of origin of their ancestors," Tajani added.
The 2020 Census found that English was the most common race or ethnicity.
Those who identified as White alone or in combination, English (46.6 million), German (45 million), and Irish (38.6 million) were the largest groups.
Lebanese, Iranian and Egyptian populations represented nearly half of the 3.5 million who reported Middle Eastern and North African descent, according to the 2020 Census.
Adam Duckworth, president and founder of Travelmation, told Fox News Digital he has more clients looking to plan their roots travel.
"This trend has grown in the past few years, with people booking these kinds of vacations in a variety of ways," he said.
"Some clients come to us with years of research, and they want to spend weeks overseas totally devoted to their family history."
"This form of travel is more common among older generations."
Duckworth said roots travelers will hire local drivers and guides who know the area well to help them locate destinations unique to their personal stories.
He says this form of travel is more common among older generations.
"They have the time to research the past, and they are growing attached to what they are learning."
He added, "They also have the finances to support a trip like this, and they often invite other family members to join them."
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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
The nightmare scenario for America's real estate market
A few years ago, Brian Boero and his wife decided to buy a vacation home in Tuscany. They envisioned owning an apartment in a medieval Italian city, the ideal splurge for a couple of empty nesters after the height of the pandemic. It was also "kind of a 'YOLO' thing," says Boero, the CEO of 1000Watt, a real estate consulting firm. Once he started hunting for a place, though, his European dream turned into a total nightmare. Shop Top Mortgage Rates Your Path to Homeownership A quicker path to financial freedom Personalized rates in minutes It didn't take long for Boero to realize he'd been spoiled by the American market. That may sound strange given the country's housing woes, but even Americans who've never bought a house have probably enjoyed the quirks that make our setup the envy of the rest of the world. When you want to get a sense of all the homes for sale in your area, you can easily cruise over to Zillow or the website of one of its competitors. The listings on these sites are pulled from industry databases that police their accuracy to ensure you're not wasting time on old or scammy postings. If you like a place, it's pretty easy for your agent to schedule a tour, scoop the keys out of a lockbox, and show you around. The rest of the buying process may come with tears and headaches, but the matter of actually finding homes is fairly seamless. Not so in Europe. The Zillow equivalents there offer only partial views of the market, turning up inaccurate listings or homes that have already traded hands. In particularly maddening cases, the same house may be listed separately by several agents, each of whom is asking for a different price. Brokers are also known to gatekeep their best listings, hiding them from the view of the average buyer. Even aggregate market data is hard to come by since there's no central clearing house for listings — it can be difficult to know whether you're getting a really good deal or a really bad one. In Italy, Boero says, he ended up having to carry out much of his search on foot, hoofing around town to peek at home listings posted in the windows of various brokerages. His real estate agent spent a lot of time on the phone, calling around to see what was available. For Boero, the whole thing felt like "feeling around in the dark." "It was shadowy, confusing," Boero tells me. "We really didn't feel like we were in control of the process." Boero is among those warning that the US market could be headed down a similar path. Some of the country's biggest real estate companies are engaged in a fierce war over the rise of "hidden listings" — homes advertised in some places but purposely kept off other sites. Zillow has gone so far as to ban listings that it says weren't shared with everyone, including Zillow, in a timely manner. Compass, the nation's largest real estate brokerage by sales volume, has responded by suing Zillow in federal court. The feud could result in a fracturing of the housing market, with home listings scattered across the internet or hidden away in so-called "private listing networks." Such a future would have real consequences for American homebuyers, who are used to getting a near-complete view of the market simply by navigating to one of the many home search websites available. There's also a bitter irony at the heart of this fight. Groups of real estate brokers in countries around the world are trying to replicate the US model at the same time that big firms on this side of the pond are squabbling over that very setup. "In France, they're laughing at the situation at this moment, honestly," Ali Attar, a real estate tech executive in Paris, tells me. The system in the US, he says, is more fragile than people realize. "They are taking it for granted in the US," Attar says. "And as soon as they destroy it, bringing it back will be extremely difficult." It took decades for the US to reach this kind of housing market transparency. The crown jewels of our modern real estate model — the things that make everything else possible — are the multiple-listing services, local databases where agents share detailed information on homes for sale. The MLSes then shuttle that info to search portals like Zillow, Redfin, or as well as the websites of thousands of local and national real estate brokerages. The average buyer doesn't get direct access to the MLSes, but with the help of the search portals, they don't really need it. Any home shopper can peruse the market, free of charge, from the comfort of their couch. The MLS model is considered by many to be the gold standard. Brokers in other countries have attempted to form similar databases, but the structure in North America remains unique. The problem isn't a lack of technological know-how — building the machinery isn't hard. The tougher part is getting brokers to agree to this kind of cooperation and enforcing the rules to make sure people don't take advantage of the system. In Europe, sellers are often represented by multiple agents who jockey to be the first to procure a buyer. There's a clear incentive to gatekeep a listing — share it around too much, and another agent might swoop in and broker a deal before you know what hit you. The popular, Zillow-like search portals in places like Spain or France are less unbiased repositories of information and more like advertising platforms. Agents ostensibly pay to display listings, but they're also marketing their own services. If a buyer inquires about a listing that's already sold, no matter — the agent can direct them to the other listings held behind closed doors. This is why listings may remain on these sites long after they've gone off the market. When it comes to drawing in more clients, there's no better lure. The ideal real estate marketplace is full of valuable, visible, and valid listings — what Attar refers to as the "three Vs." Buyers want these listings, they can find them, and the information is correct. House hunters in the US are accustomed to websites with postings that check off all three boxes. But in Europe, Attar says, home listings are typically missing at least one. "If it is valuable and it is valid, it's not visible," Attar tells me. "It's going to be hidden somewhere." Hollin Stafford, a real estate agent with eXp Realty in Portugal, can attest to these frustrations. She spent more than a decade working in the business in the States before moving to a town outside Lisbon in 2016. There she encountered a setup that, in many ways, still feels like "the Wild West," she tells me. Though Stafford has now spent years helping buyers and sellers navigate the Portuguese market through her company, Blue Horizon Properties, she hasn't forgotten the parts of the US system that she once took for granted. "You get so used to having the centralized system where you can see all of the details you need," Stafford says. "You can see what things actually sold for, and do a proper market evaluation, and all these things that you just think are par for the course." In September, real estate leaders from around the world are set to gather in Toronto for the third-annual International MLS Forum, a conference where attendees discuss plans to create the kinds of systems that buyers and sellers in the US already enjoy. Canada is the only other country with anything approaching a similar setup, says Sam DeBord, the CEO of the Real Estate Standards Organization, a nonprofit group focused on developing the technological rules and processes that undergird the MLS databases. Other places, like Egypt and France, have taken steps toward creating comparable databases. But in most cases, those with power — the big brokerages or portals that run things — have little incentive to make a change. "It's this concept of a tragedy of the commons," DeBord tells me. "If every individual goes out and takes as much as they can, all of a sudden the marketplace is ruined." There are some clear signs that the US real estate market could fall into something like the cutthroat, user-unfriendly European model. For one thing, the MLSes are basically a social construct. The National Association of Realtors — one of the most powerful industry groups in the country — effectively sets the rules for participating in these databases, and the local MLSes may levy fines against agents who run afoul of those policies. But there's no law that says it has to work this way, and recent troubles at the NAR have dented the group's influence over other power players. Actual enforcement among local MLSes is also known to be spotty. Some in the industry fear that it could all crumble if all this infighting turns into an actual exodus. Last year, Compass, which has more than 37,000 agents around the country, staked its future on a plan to draw more agents and clients by building up a stockpile of "exclusive inventory": homes that couldn't be found anywhere else. The company began heavily pushing a "three-phased marketing strategy" that encouraged sellers to test their home listings exclusively on the Compass website — first in the company's internal database and then on its public-facing landing page — before sharing them with the MLS and the major search portals. The crux of their pitch was that the MLS and sites like Zillow display information that doesn't help a seller, tracking stuff like price cuts and how long the house has been on the market. The brokerage's marketing plan, on the other hand, lets sellers fine-tune their approach and gather valuable feedback from other agents before making a broader debut. Plenty of industry figures cried foul over this plan — the whole system is predicated on the idea that agents share their listings widely and freely. But the brokerage's play also seemed to be working. Buyers want to get a first glimpse at homes however they can, and sellers may not mind testing the market in a limited capacity if they think it'll net them more in the long run. In February of this year, Compass said that more than half of its sellers were choosing to "premarket" their homes using the three-phased plan. About 94% of Compass's listings last year, including those that went through this kind of premarketing, eventually made it to the MLS, the company says, though it's not clear how long those houses spent in the databases. Even if most of these houses ended up on Zillow and the like, Compass clients still had early access to thousands of listings that couldn't be found on the big search portals. The concern now is that other big brokerages could decide to follow suit, keeping homes on their own websites before sharing them elsewhere. In this state of play, a buyer could still visit a site like Zillow to look at homes for sale, but the portal wouldn't be able to show you all, or maybe even most, of the available listings at any given moment. Instead, you'd have to jump from site to site, scouring the web for homes. The choice of an agent would carry additional weight — you'd have to consider just how much of the market they could unlock via their access to private, internal databases. The closest analogy to this hypothetical may be the fragmented world of video streaming, in which companies like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max are racing to build walled gardens of exclusive content. Sure, you can try to get access to all the shows and movies out there, but doing so requires a lot of time and money. And, frankly, it's a huge pain. Mike DelPrete, a real estate tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been warning about this threat to the search portals for years. "When it comes to browsing for real estate, consumers want access to all of the available inventory," DelPrete wrote in a blog post four years ago. "If a certain portion of listings are held off-market, available exclusively on another platform, consumer eyeballs will naturally follow." For now, a lot of eyeballs are still on Zillow, which draws more than 220 million unique visitors each month. But that's of little comfort to those who warn that Compass could trigger a domino effect among other large brokerages. The 10 largest brands in real estate accounted for more than half of US home sales volume last year, data from T3 Sixty, a consulting firm for residential real estate brokerages, shows. Even some leaders who have come out against Compass' strategy have warned that they, too, could flex their sizable market share to execute a similar game plan. MLSes need "someone to enforce the rules," DeBord tells me. In this case, that enforcer may turn out to be Zillow. The home search giant has tried to put the kibosh on all of this by banning listings that are not shared with Zillow — and the rest of the MLS — within one business day of being marketed publicly. That means as soon as a "for-sale" sign shows up in the front yard or an agent posts about a house on their website, the clock is ticking for them to send it to the databases that share listings with pretty much every other site in the industry. Those who don't comply will be left to explain to their clients why their house won't appear on the most popular home-search portal in the country. Compass has sued Zillow in federal court, accusing the company of using its monopoly power to quash a competing business model that, Compass claims, gives sellers more control over where and how their homes are marketed. In a formal response last month, Zillow disputed the monopoly characterization and argued that it shouldn't be forced to help Compass freeride on the system by accepting its stale listings only after they haven't sold on the Compass site. The brokerage's three-phased marketing strategy, Zillow's lawyers wrote, "harms consumers, who face balkanized and less liquid markets for homes, and Zillow, whose ability to attract and serve consumers depends on comprehensive, up-to-date listings." It's important to remember that anyone weighing in on this battle has a financial stake in their desired outcome. Compass wants to grow its agent base and market share. Zillow needs fresh home listings to fuel its business, which relies on selling leads to agents who pay to advertise on its platform. American companies aren't the only ones who care about this, either — brokers around the world are watching to see how this shakes out. When I talked to DelPrete back in June, he had just returned from a weekslong work trip to Europe. The fight over inventory back in the States, he says, came up "a surprising amount of times." "I think it's a case of the grass is always greener, right?" DelPrete says. "The US wants what the rest of the world has, and the rest of the world wants what the US has." There's a case to be made that all this hand-wringing will turn out to be hyperbole. The real estate industry in the US is notoriously slow to change, and consumers are used to the current setup. Zillow draws so many visitors that it's hard to imagine real estate agents shunning the platform en masse — it's simply too powerful a marketing machine. The MLS model, at least as it exists in the States, is far from perfect. More than 500 local databases form a complex web of overlapping fiefdoms that agents have to subscribe to individually. The recent class-action lawsuits against the National Association of Realtors and major brokerages cast the MLSes not as models of transparency, but as shadowy databases that helped prop up agent commissions by facilitating a sneaky practice known as "steering." There are other models that could work, too: In Australia, for instance, there's a dominant search portal where most people go to find homes, and many places sell via an auction that offers more transparency than the US system of making blind offers. And while the search portals here offer pretty comprehensive views of the market, they've never had all of the listings. There have always been so-called "pocket listings" that float around beyond the reach of the MLSes, available only to in-the-know agents who can offer their clients a leg up on the competition. But hardly anyone in the industry disagrees with the basic premise that buyers like being able to find homes easily and in one place. People may gripe about Zillow's power in the industry or the questionable accuracy of its ubiquitous Zestimate, but the ability to scroll through all the listings on the site — or those on any of the other search portals — is unique to North America. Few probably appreciate this better than Boero, the real estate exec who set out to buy the Italian getaway of his dreams. He did eventually find a place that checked off his boxes: "We're happy with it," he says. But he made that purchase with far less confidence than he had in any real estate transaction in his life. And even today, he has no idea whether it's worth more or less than it was when he bought it three years ago. The whole experience, he tells me, gave him a new appreciation for the American way of doing things. "Within the industry, we've made these comparisons ad nauseam," Boero tells me. "'Hey guys, let's not destroy this very special thing we have. Because just look at the rest of the world and how messed up it is.'" James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team. Read the original article on Business Insider
Axios
7 hours ago
- Axios
Beretta reopens in the Mission with retro Italian charm
Beretta reopened its original location in the Mission this week with a revamped menu and retro-futuristic look. State of play: After 17 years on Valencia, the neighborhood staple from restaurateur Adriano Paganini resurfaced after a six-week remodel with a menu showcasing traditional Italian dishes and signature cocktails from its early days, when it was a service industry magnet. For years, it was the Mission haven where industry folks wound down — or kept the night going — thanks to its lively atmosphere, late-night bites and endless rounds of "cheekies," miniature complimentary shots (often mezcal) shared with peers in the city's bar scene. The vibe: The refreshed space pays homage to the Italian mod era with sweeping furnishings that include a red marble bar, spherical pendant lights, burnt orange leather stools and a geometric mural with warm, golden tones. The restaurant formerly had a dark and sultry interior that combined rich wooden accents with industrial lighting and Victorian flourishes. Dig in: The menu was restored with dishes crafted by the late Ruggero Gadaldi, Beretta's original chef and partner. Those include an array of stuzzichini (Italian small bites) such as the eggplant caponatina agrodolce with burrata ($11) and saffron risotto with ossobuco ($28). Pizzas will also be a mainstay, with classics like the margherita ($18) and the new mortadella with pistachio ($25). Best sips: The cocktail program includes oldies like the Acadian with rye, sloe gin and honey ($14) and new drinks such as the Mojave Road Trip with vodka, pineapple and ancho verde ($14). Wine, nonalcoholic options and an extensive selection of spirits are also available. My thought bubble: The new space feels nostalgic — part ambiance, part memory of sitting at the bar with my coworkers after a late shift bantering over mezcal negronis and crab arancini. Some professions just understand each other. Hospitality and journalism might be two of them.
Travel Weekly
10 hours ago
- Travel Weekly
Relying on experience, travel advisors serve clients with disabilities
Lauren Scheffer, the owner of Food Allergy Getaways, walks the walk when it comes to traveling with food allergies: She has around 30 food allergies and intolerances. 'It's a double-edged sword, unfortunately,' said Scheffer, who is based just outside Charlotte. 'I don't wish that I had this many, but it's definitely given me an understanding and an ability to connect with people.' Scheffer was diagnosed with food allergies when she was in college. After graduation, when she began traveling to conferences for her marketing job, she started blogging about traveling with food allergies. It resonated. People started to reach out to ask for her help. She began consulting, then realized she could turn it into a full-time travel business serving families with food allergies. (She also works with clients with dietary preferences, like vegetarians and vegans.) Today, Scheffer specializes in land trips to Europe. She also offers a restaurant research service, where she will reach out to restaurants to inquire about their menus and protocols related to food allergies. Acceptable locations are denoted on Google Maps, as are grocery stores and local hospitals. When she starts working with a client, Scheffer digs into their food allergies and comfort levels about a variety of things. For instance, can their allergies be accommodated by a hotel, or should she find them accommodations with a kitchenette if they need to pick up safe food and prepare it themselves? When it comes to daytrips and other activities, are there restaurants that can accommodate them? 'Basically, the whole trip is looked at through the lens of, how can we do this with your food allergies, and how does that play into it?' she said. 'And then also, ultimately, what does it look like for emergencies? Hospital visits, getting travel insurance, pre-existing conditions, waivers with travel insurance — it is a full service.' Traveling with food allergies has gotten easier over the years as more countries are getting better about labeling, she said, but it's still not without risks. And she requires clients to sign waivers. 'Anytime someone leaves their home with food allergies, there is a risk,' she said. She also provides clients with food allergy cards listing their allergens prior to their trip. One side is in English and the other is in the language of their destination. Scheffer carries her own when she travels and hands them to waiters. They're also helpful in grocery stores to identify the names of allergens on food labels. Oftentimes, clients come to Scheffer with ideas of where they'd like to go. Depending on their allergies, she sometimes tries to steer them differently. For instance, while Paris is a popular destination, it's not the best for those with peanut allergies as peanut oil is often used to fry food. Another country might be more accommodating. 'A big part is just managing expectations, helping people to understand what the experience will be like and what kind of trip they're ultimately looking for,' she said. 'Because at the end of the day, you're spending a lot of money to travel, and you want to have a good time.'
