Tourists Who Stay Close to Home

Yet away from the overpriced beaches, Russia offers plenty of wonders that locals are starting to discover. "Russian middle-class tourists have had enough of 'all-inclusive' Turkish service," says Guly Alexander, a writer for Vacation to Russia magazine. "Russia can offer so many exotic treasures: hot springs in Kamchatka, sulfur springs in Caucasus, the beautiful Pacific beaches of the Far East, the mountains of the Altai." More than 200,000 Russian tourists visited Siberia's crystal-clear Lake Baikal last year—four times more than the year before—drawn by a new tourist railway along the shore and a summer shaman festival. A similar number of Russians even visited Magadan, the remote Far Eastern region famous only for its old gulags.

India, too, has embraced local tourism, offering a huge range of new options for travelers. Millions of Indians flush with cash are flocking to palaces that have been turned into hotels and castles with modern world-class spas. Even many traditional Hindu pilgrimage spots like Varanasi on the Ganges and Rishikesh in the Himalayas now boast luxury accommodations. "Low-cost airlines and rising salaries have greatly contributed to the growth of domestic tourism," says Subhash Goyal, president of the Indian Association of Tour Operators, which hopes that 65 million moneyed people will travel within India annually by 2010.

Rakesh Mathur, president of Welcome Heritage, a joint venture of ITC Hotels and Maharaja Gaj Singh of Jodhpur, is leading a boom in Indian heritage-property hotels. The company already has a portfolio of 50 resorts and retreats. "We offer a fort resort at the rim of a desert, a country resort in the lap of a green valley, or a jungle lodge in a wildlife forest reserve," he says. "Our aim is to provide an experience where you get away from all that is ordinary and enjoy something exclusive." Half his guests are wealthy Indians like Ravneet Kler, a senior manager in a New Delhi travel agency. Last December, Kler took his wife and 7-year-old son on vacation to Rajasthan. After two nights in a palace suite adorned with antique furniture and paintings, the family set out to enjoy the rural charm of a farmhouse with modern amenities. Kler rounded off the holiday with two nights at the 14th-century Kesroli Hill Fort, and was converted to Indian travel for life. "We can now spend the rest our lives traveling within India, and in comfort and luxury," he says.

Remote areas are beginning to develop their upscale tourist trades, too. Lhasa, Tibet, has three high-end hotels under construction, including the St. Regis and the Park Hyatt. The House of Shambhala Lhasa, a boutique hotel with 10 luxury rooms done in traditional Tibetan style, opened last year, catering to high-end Chinese travelers. It boasts a Himalayan menu combining traditional Tibetan favorites with a fusion of flavors from India, Kashmir, Nepal and western China. The Shambhala's founder, Laurence Brahm, takes pride in the fact that only local workers and materials (except for electrical wiring) were used in the construction of the hotel. Ninety percent of visitors to Lhasa are domestic travelers eager to see a part of their country that was inaccessible to most Chinese citizens for decades.

Indian luxury travelers have also opened up the former highland backwater of Assam. Welcome Heritage is developing three tea estates, complete with old colonial bungalows and golf courses, into golf and spa resorts. And at Ananda in the Himalayas, guests can choose from treatments based on yoga and ancient ayurvedic philosophy in a spa built on 100 acres of virgin forest surrounding a palace in the foothills of Himalayas.

Travel at home is set to grow faster than any other sector of the tourism industry, according to Tourism Futures International, which studies Asian tourism trends. And with so much to see in Eurasia, it's easy to understand why. "My friends and I have traveled all over Europe, but we haven't seen our own country," says Sergei Dubrovsky, a Moscow-based engineer who enjoyed a trekking vacation this year in the mountains of the Altai. "I could spend the rest of my life traveling around my homeland, and still not see it all." At least he'll be able to spend it in high style.

With Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing, Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi and Anna Nemtsova in MoscowWith in Beijing in New Delhi and in Moscow

© 2007