Visitor – The News Desk

On Pride Weekend, the Stonewall Visitor Center Opens

29Jun

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On Pride Weekend, the Stonewall Visitor Center Opens

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.Diana Rodriguez, the chief executive of Pride Live, which runs the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, pointed to an old-fashioned jukebox.“Go ahead, give it a whirl,” she said.I dropped in a Stonewall-branded coin and chose a song.The machine whirred, for five seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, as Rodriguez explained that it was the same model as the one that was at the Stonewall Inn on the night of the Stonewall uprising 55 years ago — the event that ushered in an era of gay pride and activism for gay rights.Five more seconds passed before the music started — the gospel standard “Oh Happy Day.”The jukebox is just one of the elements that mix past and pr...

Saudi Arabia expands visitor e-visa facility to eight additional countries – Business Traveller

Saudi Arabia has announced that it will grant visitor e-visa to travellers from eight newly-eligible countries: Albania, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, South Africa, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, for leisure, business and religious (Umrah only) travel. Nationals of these countries can apply for a visitor visa ahead of their journey via the official e-visa portal. The visitor e-visa is valid for an entire year, grants multiple entries, and permits a stay of up to 90 days, reported Saudi Press Agency. Since launching the e-visa programme in 2019, the kingdom has welcomed 93.5 million visits in 2022, a 93 per cent increase compared to 2021, resulting in a tourism spend of SAR185bn ($49bn). This tourism growth is due to expanding visa initiatives, which now include 57 nations and tw...

Going to Europe? Be Prepared for New Visitor Taxes.

When Hester Van Buren, a deputy mayor of Amsterdam, recently proposed a 1 percent increase to the city’s tourist accommodation tax — which is already among the highest in Europe — her City Council colleagues responded with a single criticism: They wanted the increase to be even bigger.“We have a lot of costs for the city, of course — for well-being, for livability,” Ms. Van Buren said in a recent interview at Amsterdam’s City Hall. “We don’t want to increase the taxes for our inhabitants. So we said, ‘Well, let the visitors pay some more.’”Across Europe, many of Ms. Van Buren’s counterparts are having similar thoughts. After several years of steady growth in urban tourism leading up to the pandemic, many European cities have found new ways to tax visitors, who are at once an important sou...