Vacation

Companies offer employees vacation before they start. “Every other company he was talking to was asking, ‘How soon can you start?’ ” says Freedman, co-founder and CEO of 42Floors, a San Francisco-based commercial real estate search engine. Freedman wanted the guy, but he didn’t want him coming in haggard and beleaguered. So he made him a job offer with one stipulation: The candidate had to take a two-week paid vacation—before his first day. Delighted and relieved, the candidate accepted.



Normal people vs me after a vacation.

Rick Snyder finally finds a teacher who supports him: his neighbor at his vacation home

11-year-old girl goes on vacation alone, horrifying parents around the world

Justin Bieber Declares Shirtless Vacation Over, But Why?

Win a Seven Day Vacation to Disney World. Contest Expires: November 2, 2014

18 Reasons Why Fiji Has To Be Your Next Vacation Destination

I have really come to love “my” Portugal. The people, the soul, the culture of this land, last but not least its beautiful, melodious language, have completely drawn me in. Already in my first article about creative travel in the Algarve region, I have shared with you some alternative travel tips in this sunny southern district of Portugal. Now, the time has come to dive even deeper. We will therefore go on a journey into the interior of the Algarve, the small town of Querenca, also known as “Aldeia da Querenca” in the local language. Even though Loulé too is a small town counting only 30.000 inhabitants, travelling into a historic village located on the nearby hilltops is another experience altogether. I have come here with my local expert guide Susana, who works as part of the “TASA” project developing creative travel in the Algarve through a series of workshops named “Painting with Earth Colours“. Part of this experience includes landscape walks learning more about the history and culture while interacting with the land as a first-time visitor.

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Ohh New Zealand, I always miss this place, Last year I visited this place and found it most beautiful place I had ever seen in this world. Check out 10 most beautiful places I visited in New Zealand.

Napier

Most Beautiful Places I Visited in New Zealand

This is the first city on my list. This city become popular and distinctive after 1931 earthquake leveled this city. You can see oriented art deco in this city. You can see many natural as well as man-made aesthetics.


Punakaiki coast

Most Beautiful Places I Visited in New Zealand

This is island located in west coast of the New Zealand. It feels like we are at the edge of the world. The beaches are rocky, violent and lush with vegetation. This place is used for service of the hordes. The most striking feature of this coastal is rock formation known as pancake rocks.


The Waikato River

Most Beautiful Places I Visited in New Zealand

This river spills out of Lake Taupo. This river is an unreal blue in color. This river is like a shape of a swimming pool. When I hiked a few kilometers along side, I finally reached to Huka Falls. You can have a view of taupo’s bungee jump from here which is situated above a picturesque bend in the River Waikato.

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Where should I go on vacation?



Go to the link above and answer to those 7 questions and you will know

Feeling buried by work, like you can't find time for a few days off, like your entire work-life balance is out of whack? If you're an American worker, it just might be.

A new study has found that U.S. workers forfeited $52.4 billion in time-off benefits in 2013, and took less vacation time than at any point in the last four decades.

American workers turned their backs on a total of 169 million days of paid time off, in effect "providing free labor for their employers, at an average of $504 per employee," according to the study.

Titled "All Work and No Pay: The Impact of Forfeited Time Off," the study was conducted by Oxford Economics for the U.S. Travel Association's Travel Effect Initiative, which studies the impact of forgone vacation time.

"Americans are work martyrs," says the U.S. Travel Association (USTA). "Tied to the office, they leave more and more paid time off unused each year, forfeiting their earned benefits and, in essence, work for free."

According to the study, in 2013 U.S. employees took an average of 16 days of vacation compared to an average of 20.3 days as recently as 2000.

"The economic potential of returning to the pre-2000 vacation patterns is massive: annual vacation days taken by U.S. employees would jump 27% (or 768 million days), delivering a $284 billion impact across the entire U.S. economy," according to the USTA.

Based in Washington, D.C., the USTA is a national, nonprofit organization representing all components of the travel industry.

Does this describe you?

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Imagine a unique destination set on a man-made marvel on the Dubai coastline that entices one and all with a distinct blend of serenity and splendour. Offering an urban escape, Anantara Dubai The Palm Resort & Spa is a wondrous place where a decadent experience awaits at a Palm Jumeirah hotel unlike any other.

Perched on the eastern crescent of the iconic Palm Jumeirah, an archipelago of islands connected to the mainland, Anantara Dubai The Palm Resort & Spa is a remarkable resort inspired by traditional Thai architecture in an Arabian setting. A 45 minute drive from Dubai International Airport and within easy reach of a plethora of exciting attractions including Aquaventure Water Park, Mall of the Emirates, Ski Dubai and Dubai Marina, this resort is where one can savour moments of bliss surrounded in unimaginable magnificence.

Designed with true Asian flair, Anantara Dubai The Palm Resort & Spa offers enchanting beach side accommodation, complemented by cuisine from Asia as well as the Mediterranean served at four speciality venues. Unwind in one of three turquoise swimming lagoons, enjoy a session at the tennis courts or gyms, or indulge in a choice of treatments at Anantara Spa. The resort also has a ballroom, six meeting rooms, a kids club and teens club, all adding to the splendour of this idyllic beach side resort destination on the Palm in Dubai.

Palm Jumeirah Hotel official Website

Portugal-Alentejo-Odeceixe

The Odeceixe beach, located at the northern end of the county of Lagos, has the particularity to contain a river beach, because it is limited to the east and north of the Ribeira Seixe, which makes a natural border with the Alentejo. Has so sea bathing and river.
The brook, which includes the largest watershed in this county, determines the dynamics of that beach, not only by the amount of sediment that "feeds", but also by the energy of the floods, which in very rainy periods may affect the shape and the size of this beach.
The Beach Odeceixe falls just on the edge of a valley dominated by this river, culminating sandwiched between towering cliffs of shale and greywacke, characteristic of this region.
The beach has a high landscape quality and biodiversity can be enjoyed in a landscape of rare beauty and huge top of the cliffs. These are prime habitat for birds, providing excellent conditions for bird watching, as the white stork, the peregrine falcon or a crow-peas-red. It is indeed in this Natural Park, the only place in the world where it is possible to observe the storks nesting in sea cliffs.

Your friends don’t want to hear about your excellent adventures.

While you may have gotten great pleasure from an epic event — sipping a rare wine in Burgundy, watching a Himalayan sunrise — that pleasure is all your own.

A recent study in Psychological Science says that despite the thrills people receive from an extraordinary experience, few anticipate its potential social cost: exclusion by friends who would really rather not hear about it.

Harvard researchers found that when people socialize, those who had the same experience, no matter how mundane, enjoyed chatting about it together. Those same people might well exclude the person who thought others couldn’t wait to hear all about his or her most unusual one.

“It’s a timely question, given how much people are sharing and bragging about their experiences through social media,” said Cassie Mogilner, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who looks at the happiness that people derive from ordinary and extraordinary events. “This suggests that people may be rolling their eyes at all those posts about amazing vacations.”

Reasonable people may disagree about what distinguishes an ordinary experience from an extraordinary one. Gus Cooney, a Harvard graduate student in psychology and the study’s lead author, defined an extraordinary experience as one that is “both enjoyable and unique.”

Before beginning the study, the researchers asked 76 participants to rate the quality of short movies. From that data, the researchers picked a high-rated film — one that left viewers feeling great — to serve as the proxy for an extraordinary experience. They picked a low-rated film, one that left viewers feeling “not very good,” as an ordinary experience.

To measure the social consequence of an extraordinary experience, the researchers then asked 68 new subjects to watch one of the movies. The researchers held 17 sessions, with four participants each. One person was shown the superior, four-star video, the “extraordinary” experience. The other three, each watching alone, saw the lackluster, two-star video, an “ordinary” experience. The group convened afterward to chat.

As it turned out, the people who had seen the best film didn’t enjoy the postfilm socializing.

“Our subjects thought they would be the star of the interaction, and they were surprised they were left out of it,” said a co-author, Daniel T. Gilbert, a Harvard social psychologist who writes about happiness. “They didn’t understand why everyone else wanted to commiserate” about the bad movie “rather than hear about their great one.”

the source

Only 1 percent of companies have discretionary time off polices, SHRM says



It's like the new "It Girl" work perk: Take as much time off as you want, as long as you get your job done.

But it may not be quite as cool as it seems.

Pioneered by tech start-ups and other small, niche businesses, these so-called "unlimited" vacation policies are now being tried out by a few bigger fish. Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, is the latest company to switch from giving employees a set number of days off to "discretionary time off."

The idea: Treat salaried employees as "responsible, trustworthy adults" who know what's expected of them and who deliver results.

"The policy is intended to give [them] greater flexibility in taking paid time off and allow them to make appropriate work-life balance decisions for themselves," said a Tribune spokesman.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson put it more bluntly in a blog post where he unveiled a similar company policy: "If working nine to five no longer applies, then why should strict annual (vacation) policies?"

Hard to argue with that.

But it's too early to say how beneficial these new "discretionary time off" policies will actually be for employees.

As it is, Americans only take three-quarters of their allotted time off, said Bruce Elliott, manager of compensation and benefits at the Society for Human Resource Management.

One reason we shortchange ourselves: Some people worry they'll lose their job or miss out on a good raise or promotion if they use all their vacation days, especially when they have a bad boss or an employer that uses layoffs as a go-to management tool.

So a take-all-you-want vacation policy may not mean you end up taking more time off than you used to. You might even end up taking less.

Is that the goal of these new policies? Tribune says no. "Employees can use the same amount of time going forward as their annual vacation allotment — and even more, if needed," the company spokesman said.

But both Virgin and Tribune make it clear that your performance better be up to snuff before requesting those days off.

"It's your responsibility to have an open discussion with your supervisor about your time off and its impact on your performance. As always, future career opportunities are assessed based on your performance and potential," Tribune's management wrote in a memo to employees published on JimRomenesko.com.

Branson wants employees to take as much time as they want, but said he assumes "they are only going to do it when they feel a hundred percent comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business -- or, for that matter, their careers!" [Italics added.]

Arguably, that is a lot of pressure to put on an employee who was just kind of hoping to spend a week at the beach. Especially since many of us already are given way more work than we can finish in a day -- and can't ever seem to catch up, said Cynthia Shapiro, a former HR executive who wrote "Corporate Confidential."

While some companies may do a great job of encouraging employees to take time as they need it, Shapiro said, she worries other employers may use it as a way to cut costs and get more out of their employees.

One way companies could save: You won't accrue vacation days that, if unused, the company would pay you for when you quit or get laid off.

Right now, only about 1% of companies offer unlimited vacation policies, according to SHRM. So it's too soon to say if it's a trend. But if these new vacation policies prove successful - either by improving employers' bottom line or by creating happier workers -- it may not be long before other businesses give them a try.

the source

Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico, has lectured the United States over our immigration laws for years. He has praised California for their lax laws regarding illegals, while he attacked Texas for daring to protect their border. He has decried those in America against the illegal invasion of our southern border. His actions and vocal opposition to American sovereignty and rule of law makes the program implemented by his country even more hypocritical and incredulous.

The National Immigration Institute (INAMI) in Mexico implemented a program that would require any visitor who was in Mexico for 7 days or longer, or who was going for paid work, to pay a fee of nearly $30. This applies to those crossing by foot, not yet applicable to car, through port of entries in Otay, San Ysidro/El Chaparral and Puerta Mexico Este.

The rationale behind their decision is even more astounding.

Rudolfo Figueroa, a representative of INAMI in Baja California said, “We are doing what should be done. Foreigners who enter Mexico have the obligation to register; if they will be in national territory for more than seven days, they have to pay the right of non-residents.”

Yet Mexican officials have for years demanded an open border policy by the United States. While the program was canceled, it is incredible that it even existed in the first place.