One can imagine that Mexico City bid farewell to 2009 with considerable relief. The bad economy coupled with spurts of regional violence kept visitors away early on, and in April, when the city became ground zero of the H1N1 pandemic, tourism fell off a cliff.

Fast-forward to the new year. In December, Mexico City became the first city in Latin America to legalize gay marriage and same-sex couple adoption. Also, it’s among seven cities worldwide selected by FIFA to broadcast all the 2010 World Cup games live on giant, public screens. Add to that the city’s humming design scene, its affordability, and legions of innovative restaurants, and the only question left is where to bed down.

After a few delays, Las Alcobas opened January 18 in the city’s affluent Polanco district. Designed by Yabu Pushelberg, whose clients include Four Seasons and St. Regis, the hotel is both modern and homey. Its 35 rooms are softened with hand-knotted rugs and contemporary Mexican art. At the top end are three penthouse suites with wraparound terraces. A small spa grants relief from the urban bustle. Near the hotel, guests can shop Avenida Presidente Masaryk, visit the modern art museum, and dine at the city’s top tables, all without hailing a cab (the traffic has yet to improve). From $415/night; lasalcobas.com

Find more exciting hotels in our Mexico City Travel Guide.

From the February/March 2010 issue of Sherman’s Travel magazine.

2010 VANCOUVER OLYMPICS
Join our Vancouver stringer, Celeste Moure, for daily happenings from the host city.

When the last of the Olympians goes home at the end of the month, the Olympic Village, a onetime industrial brownfield site, will become Vancouver’s newest urban hub, with restaurants, shops and a public access seawall for walking, biking and rollerblading. This was the last piece of the puzzle needed to link the city’s west side with Stanley Park, a 1000-acre urban park featuring millions of trees (some over 100 years old) and hundreds of miles of roads and walking trails. Within spitting distance to Stanley Park in the tony district of Coal Harbour is the Loden Hotel, sister property to the Viceroy in Santa Monica and Miami. Inside are 77 modern but serene rooms decorated in blond-wood cabinets, boldly patterned rugs, velvet chaises and chocolate brown marble bathrooms. While the hotel is fully booked during the Olympics, well-heeled locals and out-of-towners are flocking to Voya. Dishes served in the forties-styled dining room pair fresh West Coast ingredients plucked from the local waters and organic farms. Reservations recommended.

2010 VANCOUVER OLYMPICS
Join our Vancouver stringer, Celeste Moure, for daily happenings from the host city.

If you’ve been checking this spot for my daily posts from Vancouver, you’ve already read about a few free activities happening around town. Here’s another one not to miss out on: LiveCity Yaletown and LiveCity Downtown are two outdoor venues that are offering free entertainment and educational activities as well as highlights of Winter Games sport coverage and medals presentations on giant screens. Morning and afternoons are popular with families, who get to meet Olympic heroes during an interactive speaker series. Come nighttime the city’s hipsters descend upon the Yaletown venue, which is located on the water’s edge at David Lam Park, to take in a show by the likes of Wilco, Constantines, and Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley. Nearby is Opus, the city’s decidedly hip hotel popular with Hollywood celebs like Ben Affleck, international rock stars, and well-heeled execs. The hotel features a modern bistro and bar, a retro groove lounge (think egg stools and seating cubes in vibrant patterns), and 96 guestrooms designed in five distinct lifestyle-inspired décor schemes. Opus Bar, with its living room atmosphere complete with a modern fireplace-like amber wall, is a great place for a cocktail before an evening concert.

For hotel reviews, restaurant recommendations, and general trip-planning advice, check out our Vancouver Travel Guide and Whistler Travel Guide. Score cheap airfare and bargain hotel rates with our Vancouver travel deals.

When I arrived in Playa del Carmen last week, a stretch of sugar white shoreline nestled along Mexico’s famed Riviera Maya, I expected to find, well, the expected: a barrage of all-inclusive mega-resorts and pop-up American franchises interspersed with a cultural hotspot or two. Such is what Playa’s cousin, Cancun (a 45 minute drive north), has become known for. What I didn’t expect to find was an exciting new crop of oceanfront resorts not just embracing an eco-chic mantra, but successfully combining a seemingly incompatible ménage a trois of sustainability, luxury, and all-inclusivity. Blasting the belief that eco-luxury is a myth, these posh properties are not your average all-inclusives – providing Ritz-defying quality and green initiatives that go well beyond watered-down margaritas and suggested towel reuse. Read the rest of this post »

The beloved bohemian hotel, Café Cultura—known for whimsical frescoes, blazing hearths, and a cozy, lived-in feel—has traded its postcolonial villa for a princely mansion in the same New Town district of Quito, Ecuador. Built in 1937, the mansion’s former incarnation was as the elite Club Pichincha where the crème de la crème of society would gather. A striking mixture of Art Deco details and Republican–style architecture, the structure won Quito’s most prestigious architectural award in 1937. Read the rest of this post »

Now through the end of the year, West Coast art buffs can bed down beneath the works of modern masters at the St. Regis San Francisco. In honor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 75th anniversary on January 18th, the neighboring St. Regis has launched two limited edition SFMOMA suites featuring select prints from the museum’s own anniversary show.

On the 5th floor, the “Gems of the Museum” suite houses a reproduction of Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (pictured, 1905) – a painting “at the core of the controversy that led to the first modern art movement of the 20th century.” Jackson Pollack’s large-scale Guardians of the Secret (1943), one of the abstract-expressionist’s most famous works, graces an opposing wall. If your art-heart has a hankering for the City by the Bay, check into the 6th floor “Art of California” suite, featuring the works of native San Franciscoans Richard Diebenkorn (b. 1922), Anne Bremer (b. 1868), and Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) from hallway to headboard.  Read the rest of this post »

Hey movie buffs! We’ve got the scoop, hot from across the pond, that London’s celeb-favorite hotel The May Fair is launching an exciting new EatFilm club for guests early next year. Featuring “brunch and a movie,” “dinner and a movie” –type events, the club will showcase flicks from the British Film Institute’s exclusive archives (the largest in the world) in the hotel’s own high-tech private theater (built as part of the historic property’s $140 million revamp in 2006). Host of the London Film Festival and numerous press-only movie premieres (The Queen held its world premiere there in 2006, and rapper 50 Cent’s new movie Dead Man Running made its debut at the hotel last October), the posh screening room boasts 201 seats decked out in Ferrari-leather and is the only private theater in Europe with 3-D capability. The club will also employ nifty audience-interactive remote controls members of the press use to review movies at premieres, and The May Fair is in talks with the BFI to provide exclusive discussion forums with notable members of the Institute after screenings. Read the rest of this post »

If we gave you one guess as to where Sir Richard Branson was opening his first U.S. resort next summer, we’ll bet you wouldn’t say New Jersey. Alas, 45 miles outside New York City in bucolic Somerset County (half the distance from Manhattan as the Hamptons), Virgin’s daring renaissance chief, defying the Garden State’s “guido” stigma, has converted a century-old, 90-acre estate into the posh $90 million Natirar Resort and Spa. The estate itself, formerly owned by the Moroccan Royal Family, sits within a wider, 500-acre expanse of rolling lawns and woods now accessible as public parkland; its exotic moniker “Natirar” is a reversal of “Raritan,” after the local river. When complete, the resort’s Tudor-style mansion will feature 76 guestrooms with interiors designed by David Rockwell, as well as an adjacent spa, croquet field, greenhouse, and 4,000-square-foot pool. Tomorrow, the first phase of the estate’s reincarnation, the Ninety Acres Culinary Center, debuts as a sustainable restaurant and cooking school set inside a renovated carriage house. Most of the farm-to-table restaurant’s New American fare will come directly from the on-site organic farm and feature, in addition to lamb and lobster, scrumptious seasonal specialties like pizza topped with pumpkin, kale, and sage, and gingerbread panna cotta accented with poached pear and pomegranate. With entrees priced between $20-35, the menu sounds easy for any gourmand to swallow (let’s hope come summer the room rates are, too)!

Twihards of all ages – listen up! In celebration of last weekend’s opening of New Moon, the sophomore film in the Twilight series that’s created a world-wide fan frenzy and shattered box office records, a number of outfits are offering guided tours of the Pacific-Northwest settings that both inspired author Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling books and are featured in their big screen adaptations.  In Vancouver, where New Moon was filmed last spring, visitors can explore the Cullen’s House, walk the scenic woods where Edward says goodbye to Bella, and stand in the spot where Jacob morphed into a werewolf, thanks to On Location Tours Vancouver.  The 6-hour long jaunts cost $149 ($119 for kids) and are offered every weekend. Afterwards, you can check into Vancouver’s trendy Opus Hotel, where “RPatz” himself liked to sip martinis before bedding down after a hard day of brooding for Bella. Read the rest of this post »

France-based Sofitel hotels are generally known for their, naturally, French flair, but the luxurious brand’s Philadelphia property is adding a dash of English charm with its new London taxi service. For hire by hotel guests only, the iconic London taxi, imported directly from England, offers free rides around town and to/from the Philadelphia International Airport (a 20-minute drive) Mondays through Fridays between 7 and 9 A.M (reservations recommended). Booking the service any other time of day will cost you, depending on the duration of your ride, upwards of $25 for lifts within the city center and $45 to the airport. Not cheap for most chaps, but the five-seat, mini-bar laden cab makes for a bloody fun alternative to typical transportation, wouldn’t you say?