Ideas – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

Some habits are hard to break – but that doesn’t seem to be the case when traveling.

The habits of travelers are changing – quickly and en masse. People are bypassing big cities in favor of smaller destinations that attract fewer tourists, and outdoor activities like hiking and biking are attracting more interest than before.

To avoid the crowds while spending time in the great outdoors, here are seven points to consider once you are safe to travel again.

Normandy, France

France has been the most visited country in the world for years. Travelers congregate in inland Paris, on the French Riviera in the south, and in the country’s world-famous wine regions, which are spread across the bottom two-thirds of the country.

But what about the north? Regions along the English Channel such as Normandy receive a small fraction of French tourists, making them ideal for travelers wanting to experience the country and avoid large groups.

Although Normandy is relatively calm, the Mont Saint-Michel, a Gothic-style Benedictine abbey less than a mile from mainland France, is packed with people.

MathieuRivrin | Moment | Getty Images

Normandy is popular with World War II history buffs who tour the iconic D-Day beach invasion sites, as well as their cemeteries and monuments. Others are drawn to the beach towns of Deauville and Trouville, the cobblestone streets of Honfleur, and the majestic tidal island of Mont Saint-Michel.

As in much of France, the food is another draw. Normandy is famous for Camembert cheese, Calvados liqueur and Tarte aux Pommes (apple tarts).

The “other” islands of Greece

According to the World Bank, Greece received around 10 million tourists a year in the mid-1990s. By 2019 that number had more than tripled.

According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, five regions accounted for 88% of all overnight stays in 2017, namely the South Aegean, Crete, the Ionian Islands, Central Macedonia and Attica. Almost half of all hotel rooms are in Crete and the South Aegean Islands, the latter including popular destinations of Santorini, Mykonos, and Rhodes.

Travelers can escape the crowd by choosing a Greek island like Lipsi, which receives far fewer tourists than Santorini or Mykonos.

Fabio Sabatini | Moment open | Getty Images

Makis Bitzios, general manager of the Greek tourism consultancy Remake, said that tourists are highly concentrated in the most popular Greek islands and many others have far fewer tourists, including Iraklia in the Cyclades archipelago and Lipsi in the Dodecanese.

“Both islands are very beautiful, without the crowds, very authentic and not as well known as many other Greek travel destinations,” he said.

Central Vietnam

Many international tourists to Vietnam travel north to Hanoi and Halong Bay or south to Ho Chi Minh City.

Those who venture into the center usually head to Hoi An Old Town, the dazzling hotels outside Da Nang, or the historic sites of Hue and My Son.

The Anantara Quy Nhon Villas are an all-villa resort in the Vietnam region on the south coast.

Courtesy Anantara Quy Nhon Villas

A few years ago, a small number of resorts were betting that travelers would be drawn to the more sleepy parts of Vietnam.

Anantara, a luxury brand from the Minor Hotels Group, was one of them. It opened the Anantara Quy Nhon Villas in 2018 as the first international five-star hotel in a part of Vietnam that received few international visitors.

The resort has 26 ocean view villas, each with ocean views and private pools.

The brand opened another location, Anantara Mui Ne, four hours east of Ho Chi Minh City.

“Both Anantara Quy Nhon Villas and Anantara Mui Ne are in remote areas and in their own gated locations that offer peaceful experiences but are close to local locations,” said Pieter van der Hoeven, Regional General Manager of the CNBC brand Global Traveler by email.

Another inland attraction is the colossal Son Doong Cave. First explored in 2009, only 1,000 travelers are allowed to explore each year. This is a limit to protect the cave, which is considered to be one of the largest and most magnificent in the world.

Kagawa, Japan

Not to be confused with Kanagawa, the popular coastal prefecture south of Tokyo. Kagawa is Japan’s smallest prefecture by geographic size. At about 724 square miles, it’s about two and a half times larger than New York City, yet is home to less than 1 million people.

Kagawa is located on Shikoku Island and receives a small number of Japanese tourists. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, fewer than 550,000 of the nearly 32 million international tourists to Japan went to Kagawa in 2019.

Travelers looking to tour feudal castles, temples and gardens and want to eat udon – the famous dish is closely linked to the prefecture where the noodles are made from locally grown wheat – can check out the village of Urashima.

Urashima Village is a secluded inn with three private buildings (one of which is called “Silence”) overlooking the uninhabited Maruyama Island.

Courtesy Urashima Village

The small luxury inn opened in January and offers guests the chance to work in peace, kayak in the sea and explore the country by bike.

The inn, manned by a concierge team and a private chef, overlooks the uninhabited island of Maruyama, which the hotel’s website says guests can enter twice a day if an “underwater lane” emerges at low tide.

Dandenongs, Australia

While Melbourne receives the lion’s share of awards (and tourists) for the Australian state of Victoria, there are numerous destinations outside of the city that deserve recognition.

One such place is the Dandenongs, a serene mountain range of bucolic bed and breakfasts, forest gardens, and family-owned restaurants.

Less than an hour from Melbourne, the Dandenongs Ranges are a mountainous area with great food and small town friendliness.

Nigel Killeen | Moment | Getty Images

Upscale homes are available for rent at Valley Ranges Getaways in Sassafras, one of the region’s most popular villages. Another visitor favorite, Olinda, sits just two miles down the road. Both are lined with craft shops, antique shops, and restaurants serving local wine.

Travelers can head to Healesville Sanctuary to get up close and personal with wombats and kangaroos, or pre-order tickets to ride on Puffing Billy, a preserved open-car steam train.

New Mexico

Travelers to and within the United States may want to skip the coasts in favor of the American Southwest this year.

According to the data company Statista, New Mexico is the seventh most populous state in the United States, with an average of 17 people per square mile. Nicknamed the Land of Enchantment, the state has national parks, the Aztec Ruins National Monument, wonderful caves, and rugged red and white desert biomes.

Some of the most luxurious hotels in New Mexico, such as the Inn of the Five Graces and the Hotel St. Francis, are located in the capital Sante Fe, which has a population of 85,000.

Ghost Ranch near Abiquiú, New Mexico, is an area with an eclectic mix of former residents, including dinosaurs, Spanish settlers, and artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

Dean Fikar | Moment | Getty Images

However, the Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado Sante Fe sits on 57 acres outside of town. Guests stay in suites and freestanding casitas, which means “little houses” in Spanish, with southwestern décor and wood-burnt, Pueblo-inspired kiva fireplaces.

Overlooking the Rio Grande River Valley and the nearby Jemez Mountains, the resort features a year-round pool, outdoor fire pits, and an adventure center that offers hot air balloon rides, horse riding and white water rafting, and cultural tours to Ghost Ranch, or organizes Bonanza Creek Ranch where films like “Cowboys & Aliens” and “Wild Hogs” were filmed.

Saba and Saint Eustatius

With the Caribbean islands typically averaging over 30 million international travelers a year – a number not counting cruise line passengers – the number of international visitors visiting the small Caribbean islands of Saba and Saint Eustatius might just be a rounding error.

Both islands are special municipalities in the Netherlands and, according to the Dutch government agency Statistics Netherlands, each receive fewer than 10,000 tourists by air each year.

Saba and Saint Eustatius (shown here) are part of the Netherlands Antilles and provide a secluded escape for hiking, diving, and immersion in ecotourism.

Westend61 | Westend61 | Getty Images

A third of visitors come from other islands – namely Aruba, Curaçao, and Saint Martin – with at least another third including travelers from the United States and the Netherlands.

On Saba, Queen’s Gardens Resort & Spa received a Travelers’ Choice Award from TripAdvisor at Mountaintop 2020, while Saint Eustatius (also known as Statia) offers home rentals that range from modest bed and breakfasts to three-level villas on Airbnb.

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Walmart announced last month that it was raising wages for some of its low-wage workers. Investors responded by beating up their stocks, sending them down more than 6 percent that day.

That wasn’t quite as bad as in 2015, when the retailer’s shares fell 10 percent after it was announced that a wage hike would hurt profits.

Walmart wasn’t fancy. Half of Walmart’s hourly employees, or about 730,000 employees, are still making less than $ 15 an hour after the last increase went into effect last week. The retail giant made $ 13.5 billion in profits last fiscal year.

In recent years, managing directors have publicly expressed their commitment to “stakeholder capitalism” and “doing good by doing good”. However, when it comes to paying workers wages that can support their families, investors send a clear message to executives: raise wages at your own risk.

That’s a problem. The share of employee compensation in our national production has declined sharply for decades, and in particular since 2000. Low-wage workers at companies like Amazon, McDonald’s and Walmart rely on public support like grocery stamps to make ends meet from the Government Accountability Office, according to an October report. A shocking 30 percent of Americans couldn’t easily come up with $ 400 on their own in an emergency, and women and people of color generally earn less than their peers.

However, two new books highlight good ideas for a fairer distribution of wages, some of which are new and some of which are no longer used. You may even be able to help investors accept this reallocation.

Set pay for positions, not people

Kim Scott is concerned about how bias affects employee pay. In her new book, Just Work, Ms. Scott, a former executive at Apple and Google, challenges managers to assess the gender, racial and ethnic pay gap. “Unless you believe that white men are superior to others and are paid more because of it, it is impossible to believe that bias is not a factor,” she writes. American women, for example, only earn about 85 percent of the earnings of men.

Ms. Scott’s recommendations are not common practice in most organizations, but they make sense. The first is to ensure that no person has unilateral power over the compensation. Companies should have fixed salaries or salary ranges for each role. People hired for the same job should have similar, if not identical, letters of offer. Job candidates can haggle for signing bonuses if necessary, but even then only within a scope that the company determines and discloses.

Another strategy for a fairer wage distribution that Ms. Scott advocates is compensation transparency, in which companies publish the compensation for a specific position. This is common with Buffer, a social media tools company, and many government agencies as well. “More and more companies are realizing that the easiest way to close wage differentials is to solve the puzzle,” Ms. Scott writes.

Ms. Scott also urges company executives to examine the gap between executive pay and that of their worst paid employees. Research shows that increasing compensation for low-wage workers is one of the most effective ways to narrow the persistent racist pay gap. “If you are responsible for the compensation, you can pay people who are paid less and less,” Ms. Scott writes. “I’m not talking about communism. I am speaking of general human decency. “

Some companies think similarly. Costco recently increased its starting wage from $ 15 to $ 16 an hour. The retailer has long been a case study of how higher wages can be a good business strategy to reduce employee turnover and theft and improve customer service. Best Buy and Target raised the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour last year. According to Amazon, Amazon benefited from higher work ethic and retention, as well as a significant increase in applications, after the starting salary for all U.S. employees was raised to $ 15 an hour in 2018.

PayPal for the past few years has focused on employee financial health, including a metric known as net disposable income, or what employees have left after taxes and necessary living expenses. It increased the company’s salaries and health insurance contributions for its worst-paid workers, resulting in greater employee satisfaction and retention.

Note that payment is not always linked to performance

Jake Rosenfeld takes up the myths about how companies give compensation in “You get paid for what you’re worth”. One of the biggest myths is that what we get paid reflects our performance, argues Rosenfeld, professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis.

In theory, workers should be paid based on how much money a company is making from their work, and this may be clear to some rainmakers. But that is often not the case. Mr. Rosenfeld blames several structural factors for undermining the bond between the value workers who contribute to their employer’s income and their compensation, including non-compete agreements, opacity about salaries, company performance, and market concentration.

In addition, Mr. Rosenfeld makes the provocative claim that measuring the performance of most individual workers is unsuccessful. “For many jobs today, the entire effort to measure marginal productivity is wrong – not because the right tools were not developed, but because there is no way to separate the productivity of one worker from that of others in the organization,” he said.

He argues that even if it is possible to link individual performance to sales, as is the case with salespeople and lawyers, performance-based payment has deep shortcomings, such as: B. the creation of cutthroat competition between colleagues.

What is the alternative when performance-based pay is so problematic? One way is to link pay to performance across the company. Profit-sharing programs, where companies give their employees a percentage of their income, were common in the US before the 1980s, but have largely disappeared since then.

Mr. Rosenfeld also suggests an approach where younger workers are unlikely to find fans: pay is based on seniority. It robs managers of their ability to play favorites, reduces the effects of bias, and rewards the experience. “The seniority-based compensation ensures that we are paid for our improvement,” argues Rosenfeld.

What happens next?

American political leaders play a role here. The federal minimum wage proposal of $ 15 did not make it under the latest economic legislation. But democratic leaders have vowed to pass it sooner or later. (President Biden has also committed to strengthening unions, the decline of which since the 1980s has helped weaken workers’ leverage over compensation.)

A significant majority of American voters have historically supported raising the minimum wage to $ 15. And even this level is not enough to provide workers with an income sufficient to cover basic costs in many parts of the country.

As Walmart was very clearly reminded, investors are not necessarily on the same page as the general public when it comes to better wages. This is myopic. Researchers like Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, have shown that businesses can be just as profitable by paying higher wages thanks to benefits like higher quality goods and services and lower turnover. When workers struggle to make ends meet, it holds the economy back because they consume less.

In addition, fair pay is an important basis for a fair society. Now is a good time to reset assumptions about why we get paid, what we get paid, and how compensation is determined. There are new approaches for those who are open to them.

What do you think? How can fairer pay be made? And can it ever really be associated with performance? Let us know: dealbook@nytimes.com.