Trendy Travelers City Hop in Search of Luxury Eating

March 30, 2007 (PRLEAP.COM) Lifestyle News
EuroBookings.com, leader in European hotel bookings, reveals a growing trend among travelers of hopping from city to city specifically in search of exquisite tastes. The trend, often referred to as ‘table hopping’, is growing in popularity with travelers in search of the finest culinary experiences in the world.

“Food is one of the most intimate ways to truly experience a region’s culture. We have seen an increasing number of people traveling specifically for table hopping adventures. These are very trendy travelers that follow the Michelin Guide stars to the most exquisite tastes of Europe,” says Marcel Stillekens, co-owner of EuroBookings.com (http://www.eurobookings.com).

The Michelin Red Guide, known as the ‘classic guide to exceptional restaurants,’ is Europe’s oldest and most revered restaurant guide and the hallmark of serious table hoppers throughout the main cities of the continent. Michelin recently expanded the guide to include New York and San Francisco, and most recently Tokyo.

Stillekens says that yet another travel trend gaining in popularity is also based around cuisine. Cooking school holidays in trendy cities throughout Italy, France, and Spain have attracted a growing amount of interest over the past 18 months. Cooking school tours allow guests to shop at local markets for fresh ingredients, enjoy fine wines with kindred spirits, and partake in the experience of creating mouth-watering meals with like-minded fellow travelers.

“Many of these cooking schools like Mama Margret in Italy, and the Rhode School of Cuisine in France have turned the art of cooking into a full-fledged adventure vacation. We see the growing interest in this type of vacation travel as an indicator of society’s desire to get back to basics in today’s busy world,” says Stillekens.

To enhance the experience of travelers looking for France hotels and Italy hotels that are off the beaten track from the major tourist attractions, EuroBookings.com has designed a website feature to help travelers find their perception of the ideal European hotel in proximity to any destination in Europe.

Using the new feature, travelers can enter a city name on the homepage and instantly receive an at-a-glance list of the European hotels within that city, as well as their availability, star rating, and photo. To help traveler’s book hotels in close enough proximity to their attraction of interest, EuroBookings.com browsers can then select landmarks near which they would like to find hotels. Each European of the 25,000+ hotel listings also includes a detailed street-level map so that vacation planners can visually see the distance and direction between their hotel choices and their vacation destinations.

“We are constantly adding features to the website that will make it simple for travelers to quickly find high-class, discount hotels in regions both inside and outside of the major metropolitan areas. Being travel fanatics ourselves, we understand the difficulty in trying to pinpoint that perfect hotel in a place where you may have never visited before. A hotel has such an impact on the overall experience—that’s why we’re so passionate about making it simple to find the right one,” Stillekens explains.

Stillekens says that some of the most popular locations for table hopping are in cities covered by the Michelin Red Guide including cities in France, Austria, Benelux, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal, Switzerland, the UK and Ireland. Popular locations for cooking school holidays are Province, France and Tuscany, Italy.

About EuroBookings.com: EuroBookings.com http://www.eurobookings.com is a Holland-based travel and tourism company that offers deep discount rates on more than 25,000 France hotels, Italy hotels, and other popular European hotels. Per it’s commitment to its customers and the traveling community, EuroBookings.com offers translation in 13 languages, and charges no reservation fees, no cancellation fees, and no advance payments for trip planners.