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Berlusconi Pushes Italian Staycations, Gets YouTube Backlash Instead

The only silver lining around Silvio Berlusconi's recent tourism ad, where he tried to cajole Italians into vacationing domestically rather than traveling abroad, is that he didn't actually use the word "staycation." That obviously would have been beyond the pale. Regardless, this commercial, where the Prime Minister intones about "Magic Italy" as the camera pans over the country's most famous landmarks, has already become a public relations fiasco for the government.

Rather than inspiring locals to embrace Italy's beauty and heritage, the commercial has triggered a wave of sarcastic YouTube knockoffs. The spoofs take the ad's soaring audio track and juxtapose it with images of roiling national turmoil. Instead of the Sistine Chapel, you get pictures of rioters; instead of fountains, crumbling buildings; and instead of coastlines, picture after picture of garbage left uncollected in the streets. That's what happens when you make a personal, emotion-packed appeal to a nation where 59% of the people think that you're too corrupt and/or incompetent to govern well. Oops!

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Travel Writers Desperate for New Buzzwords as Staycation Meme Rages

Back in March, we marveled at the sudden ubiquity of the term staycation in the travel media, charting the trajectory from its 2003 birth in the pages of the Myrtle Beach Sun-News to a staggering 242 mentions in newspapers and websites that month. At the time, I assumed that the market was saturated with staycation stories and they'd soon begin to peter out, but I was dead wrong. Google News has 1,078 mentions of the grating portmanteau for the month of May, more than four times the number for March.

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Malibu is The Ultimate Styacation For Celebs

Celebrities really are just like us. They go to their friend’s houses for Memorial Day parties too, the only difference is, they are greeted by a valet and a swarm of paparazzi, while we’re parking on the lawn and fighting off swarms of mosquitoes.

Some A-Listers chose to get away for the weekend, like Cameron Diaz who was spotted on a beach in Hawaii and TomKat who spent their weekend honoring veterans in Washington D.C., but most stayed home to attend one of the year’s biggest events, Joel Silver’s Memorial Day Party in Malibu. Silver is a major Hollywood player, producing movies like "The Matrix" and "Lethal Weapon" and by the looks of who attended his soiree, no one wants to get on his bad side.

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Staycation Story Trend Saves Travel Journalism

There's nothing like a funny-sounding buzzword to launch a library's worth of stories in the travel media. Such is the case with staycation, a portmanteau that describes a vacation spent at or close to one's home, exploring local attractions and festivals. Just about every major media outlet has made the staycation a central theme of their recession 2008-2009 travel coverage, providing a treasure trove of previously-covered story ideas that need only to be repackaged and repurposed for a local audience ("Staycation in Cleveland," "Staycation in Schenectady," etc.). I don't doubt the staycation trend is real, but I find it funny just how much the term seems to have stimulated coverage of a phenomena that probably goes back to the Great Depression and beyond, namely, when people have less money, they cut back on leisure travel.

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