Recently Conde Nast Traveller magazine announced the readers’ travel awards 2009 scored in 26 categories.
The data has been gathered by filling forms published in April magazine sold on UK market, and online.
Italy has been voted the best overseas country in the world, three Italian towns scored high, popular are also some Italian hotels and spas.
Here are the results for best ten overseas countries, with last year place in bracelets:
1.Italy (3 )
2.New Zealand ( 1 )
3.Turkey (15 )
4.Australia ( 11 )
5.France ( 6 )
6.Egypt ( 13 )
7.USA ( 8 )
8.South Africa ( 7 )
9.Spain ( 10 )
10.India ( 2 )
Three countries dropped from the first ten : Thailand , Brazil , Greece.
One of big losers here is India, the drop from the second place, can be explained by the terrorist thread, especially after the spectacular November 2008 attacks in Mumbai.
This political uncertainty will influence overall tourism in Eastern countries.
I was interested influence of global crisis on tourists preferences, who would choose overall cheaper countries, or closer to home, in this case Great Britain, as the Conde Nast readers are mainly from this country.
Indeed the European countries improved their overall positions in the ranking, but still popular are countries farther from UK , like New Zealand or South Africa, curiously enough, all with Commonwealth tradition.
Unfortunately Conde Nast does not publish the number of pool participants, so the accuracy of the opinions of would be only judged by the magazine popularity.
