In Spanish, the verbs conocer and saber both mean “to know”. Conocer comes from the same root as the English words “cognition” and “recognize”, and generally means “to be familiar with.” Saber on the other hand, means a few different things. Primarily, it means “to know” in the sense of “to know a fact”, or “to possess knowledge about”. It can also mean “to have flavor”, as in sabe rico, it tastes good.
I wanted to know this place. I ...
Have you noticed how time – arguably one of our most precious commodities – isn’t waiting for us to get our shit together? Excuses proliferate on why we put things off that matter to us: visiting a wizened, old family member before they head to the country, volunteering for a worthy cause we say we believe in, going back to school to learn something fresh, taking that ambitious trip we’ve talked about for years. Time – as the erudite ...
Peru is on a roll. It's been four years since my last visit, and I've spent a week experiencing a staggering amount of growth in development and tourism since then. I am convinced that the next four years will bring even more growth to this amazing country.
Tourism is Peru's 3rd largest industry behind mining and fishing, representing 7% of GDP and is the country's fastest ...
While I was in San Francisco last week, I had dinner with friends in Berkeley. After dinner one offered me his empty apartment to avoid the drive back to the city. It was a nice gesture that ultimately ended up falling flat when he gave me the wrong key. No worries, we're friends remember. I ended up just driving back to the hotel, got to ...
In 1976, visionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his first book, The Selfish Gene. It was his word for the informational equivalent of the gene: a self-replicating, evolving idea. The sort that occasionally hooks into a moment in societal consciousness and establishes itself in people's minds. Whether silly or profound, these memes represent a new way of thinking about some small part of our world, and we can't help but be affected by them.
For ...
A couple weeks ago I made the case on this blog that the adventure travel industry needed to "manage up" to harness the power of the larger tourism industry in order to advance its goals of preserving places and cultures.
A day or two after that post went up, this headline from the Las Vegas Sun popped up on my monitor:
"Travel Expert: Environmental policies loom as tourism threat."
The ...
It seems to me that the more zeros you add to a number, the harder it is to understand. Which is too bad because in today's world, numbers matter. Numbers help us keep score. And like it or not, keeping score is what the world does.
I just returned from the Adventure Travel World Summit in Aviemore, Scotland. Lots of good haggis, good scotch and good people doing some really interesting things. But what I didn't see was ...
Last week a few of us attended the Montana Economic Development Summit in Butte, Montana. Winding down the first night with a drink at the Cavalier Lounge, we asked the bartender where we should go for breakfast the next morning. He couldn’t say Bob & Sandy’s (B&S) Café fast enough.
Always a group to take a local’s suggestion, we made the trek to the breakfast joint the next morning, and not only did we enjoy a very ...
This weekend I camped at Madison Junction in Yellowstone — Friday until yesterday. No, we didn’t get rained out but had a snowstorm while cooking dinner Sunday night. On Saturday, a group of people camped next to us, riding in on bikes and settling up a camp of a few tents and wind shelters. One of the group, Charlie Kain, came over to visit after we started asking about biking through Yellowstone.
What we learned is that they are the ...
The epic journey began with a simple quest. We needed a shuttlecock. After a few quick giggles over the term shuttlecock the mission began. The first stop was the hardware store, the guy in the Hooters shirt, sweating profusely, suggested the local market. "Two blocks on the right. Veer left…" Sounded simple enough. "Then you'll hit the sunny stretch." He wasn't lying. Molly sweated her way through her dress a quarter of the way there, only to find ...
The warning sign as you walk in the Headwaters Heritage Museum, Three Forks, Mont.
What is the point of not allowing photography in an era of social media? Unless it's the Mona Lisa, it would seem that photos can be shared and help promote the place… especially a place in need of promoting like Three Forks.
Meggan breaking the rules upstairs with the coolest part of the museum — a display of 700 different types of barbed wire.
On a recent surf trip to Costa Rica I was reminded of an important lesson… if you really want a feral experience you’re going to have to travel a bit further than most. Perhaps not a further distance, simply a different compass bearing. When the guidebook says, “go right” I’ve learned I’m better off going left… or, perhaps, splitting the difference.
Just north of Malpais, Costa Rica, the coastal town of Santa Teresa smells of ripe mangos ...
Last week I was picking up some visiting friends at the Days Inn in Bozeman and I saw a Travelers for Open Land key card holder in their suite. It was a modest little piece of collateral that Mercury produced in the process of helping a group of Montanans transform a big idea into a simple reality.
The idea: People who want to explore Montana's unspoiled natural beauty want to preserve it. (And so do the folks who make ...
When Mercury first started to focus on leading creative strategic communications with the Geotravel market, Jeff asked the team for input on how we can live, eat and breathe the Geotravel lifestyle in everything we do here. As a result, field trips to some of the Geotravel gems in our own neighborhood are one of the ways we take time to be the kind of people we want to connect with.
Last month's trip took us the Amaltheia Organic ...
Great time at CSD’s Geotourism Summit in DC.
Montana was an early adopter of Geotourism and remains a leader having 2 of only 6 U.S. map projects located here in Big Sky Country. However, the successes here are built primarily on the idea that Geotourism is the best economic choice for our state, not because of its social and environmental benefits. Of course, those attributes are extremely important and the very essence of what Geotourism is. But destinations ...
Here’s another post from the old website archives…this one a little more than a year old. Nice to see how much progress we’ve made in building our business model as the world’s first and only marketing communications agency to focus on Geotravel.
The 5 Keys to Communicating with Geotravelers was the subject of a talk by MercuryCSC’s Jeff Welch at the ABETA Summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil, September 10-13, 2009.
ABETA is Brazil’s Ecotourism and Adventure Travel Trade Association serving hundreds of tour operators and destination marketing officials throughout South America’s largest nation. Welch, who is the CEO of MercuryCSC, was invited due to his company’s understanding of the geotravel market and their success in reaching this market ...
Jeff Welch, Chief Executive Officer of MercuryCSC, was a featured speaker on a climate change panel that was hosted by the National Parks Conservation Association and the Big Sky Institute in February 2009. Citing research on the geotraveler and the importance of tourism to Rocky Mountain States’ economies, Welch suggested that extreme climate change could have a large and negative economic impact in Montana and throughout the Rocky Mountain West. "If the wildlife, natural wonders and recreational opportunities that geotravelers ...