Here I Am in London Again…

With Secrets of Direct Marketing and More Generalizations 

I flew here from Poland on Monday to meet with some former business partners and colleagues and give the keynote presentation at Fix Fest, a seminar on copywriting produced by two friends and former mentees who’d topped off successful careers by starting an advertising agency in London.

The gestalt of the event was unlike any industry event I’ve produced or attended. It was promoted like a rock concert and held in a large crypt under an old church in midtown. The marketing was successful, as more than 200 people bought expensive tickets for the affair. They had a sort of soul choir singing while eventgoers paraded in. The room was festooned with banners and bows. They had mystery guests and snacks and surprise gifts. During the afternoon break, they had one of those poetry slams. And I was on the poster as one of the two “featured” speakers!

Apart from the promotional and presentational aspects of the show, Fix Fest was unusual in that its lineup of speakers included both notable direct response experts and experts from the brand marketing industry (the ad agencies that produce TV commercials and magazine ads).

That they put us together surprised me. There is a longstanding enmity between us. Copywriters from ad agencies consider themselves superior to us direct marketers because they work in nicer offices, and win awards, and have TV shows made about them. They also consider themselves superior to us because the sort of work they do tends to be clever and entertaining (think Super Bowl ads), whereas our work products are, in comparison, wordy and mundane.

This distinction was palpable in the first two presentations. The first speaker’s speech title was “Solitude,” and the content was something about finding your headlines by walking alone in the woods… or some such thing. The second speaker was even worse in that his entire presentation consisted of showing the audience his award-winning work, which was, to give credit where it’s due, impressively creative. But it was also almost absent of any actual selling of the product he was paid to sell. I don’t know how ad agencies get away with doing that – except that their customers (marketing executives that couldn’t sell a pizza to a hungry Roman) don’t realize that what they are paying for is nothing but a big fat ego trip.

At the end of this second presentation, the speaker gave the assembled audience (most of them from our industry) a list of “rules about copywriting that are wrong.” Rules like “long copy sells better than short copy” and “funny doesn’t work.” I recognized the list. It came from one of the books I wrote on copywriting. The bastard was launching a grenade!

When it was my turn to address the audience, I couldn’t resist taking a few pot shots at my ill-informed fellow speaker. I told them that getting prospects to laugh takes skill. Getting them to cry takes even more skill. But the greatest skill a copywriter can have is to get the prospect to respond to the ad by forking over his hard-earned money.

I tried to stop there, but I couldn’t help myself. The attendees had paid a lot of money to be there, and I felt that I had a moral obligation to set them straight. Also, I felt that my fellow speaker merited another salvo.

So I told them that the only selling that brand agencies know how to do is to sell a business on the idea that the money they are about to spend on a brand advertising campaign will be worth it. It’s almost never worth it, I said, but that doesn’t matter to the agencies. And the client, if he’s a good client, has a multimillion-dollar advertising budget and no way of measuring the success of the ad in dollars and cents. He wants to see it on TV. He wants his friends to talk about it.

I should have stopped there. But again, I couldn’t restrain myself. I told them that there are hundreds of direct response copywriters that make million-dollar yearly incomes. To make that kind of money in the agency marketing world, you’d have to own the agency, I said. And it would have to be an agency at the top of the heap.

That accomplished, I moved on to other topics, such as how the industry has changed in the last 40 years and why they would probably be replaced by AI in the next five years.

The crowd seemed to enjoy it. But I was told afterwards that my microphone wasn’t working and nobody could understand a word I said. Never mind. Pearls before swine.

So… what about London? After my observations about the Poles in my last two posts, what can I tell you about the Brits?

I’ve been to London dozens of times, but I was never a big fan. I understood the touristy attractions – the Crown Jewels and the changing of the guard and all that. But I always found London a little depressing. Londoners lack the charm of the denizens of Rome, Barcelona, and  Lisbon. They also lack the je ne sais quoi of Parisians.

And the city itself, for all its attractive Victorian buildings, is noisy and dirty. Like New York.

And like New Yorkers, Londoners – at least the upper crust – feel superior to Americans. Not in the French or Polish or Chinese way. (People of those cultures are superior.) But in the Big Apple “We are the center of the universe” way. Plus, they drink an unbelievable amount of beer almost every evening after work. And they may be the most boisterous and pugnacious people in the entire world.

That said, they are loads of fun. (Though their sense of humor is absolutely impossible to understand.) And very accepting of you if you can stand up to them while draining down pint after pint of pilsner at a local pub.

And, of course, they have crappy weather. Which probably explains most of the criticisms I’ve just made.

To be fair, these aren’t my true feelings about the Brits. They are simply semi-serious generalizations. London’s denizens are, at some core level, just like us, their cousins across the pond. The good and the bad.

I’m writing this as I sit outside an elegant little bistro called Stoles Kitchen and Bar, served by an attentive and completely adorable young woman named Eliza, who speaks with the same cockney accent as Eliza Doolittle, but who, to her great benefit, has no idea who Eliza Doolittle is.

As I’m writing this, a man, about 50, walks by. He’s scrappy – almost homeless looking, but handsome in a crusty, weathered way. He passes and then returns to tell me how much he likes the aroma of the cigar I’m smoking. He says he could tell it’s a good cigar. “Is it a Chiba?” He asks. I tell him no, it’s not a Chiba. And that I stopped smoking Cuban cigars when I realized that every other one was “shit.” (The Brits are very fond of saying “shit” and “fuck.” I don’t know why.)

We fall into a lighthearted debate about cigars, and then I offer him one of the cigars I’m smoking, a Nicaraguan Padron Anniversario. “This is the best cigar in the world,” I tell him. He accepts it graciously. I cut it for him. He lights up. He’s smiling now. A smile that is genuine. This guy knows cigars. He shakes my hand. His grip is leather-wrapped steel. I ask him what he does for a living. He is a bricklayer. I ask him if he played a sport as a young man because I can feel that he did. He played rugby, he says. I tell him about my rugby experience playing for a French team in Chad. He tells me his best rugby story. We part as friends.

These things happen everywhere. But in New York and London, they happen all the time.

The steak is very good. And the wine, a Barolo, is as good as any I have had in Piedmont. And the prices, for the wine and the steak, are less expensive than K and I were paying for similar dinners in Poland. Factor that against the current exchange rate, and I’ve nothing but the best things to say about these annoyingly familiar cousins of ours across the pond.

Pleasure Before Business, Part 2 

Ms K has been treating me like an idiot on this trip. I resented it at first, but it’s working out quite nicely.

Yesterday, for example, we traveled from Krakow to Zurich, where I was to hop on a flight to London and she was taking a flight back to Miami 90 minutes later. The process began first thing in the morning, with her instructing me, in the simplest of terms, how to get my things together. Likewise, as we made our way through security and passport control. Likewise, boarding the plane and again before de-planing. In Zurich, she accompanied me all the way to my gate, to make sure I didn’t wander off somewhere and miss my flight. And she did all of this very matter-of-factly. As if this was how we always traveled, her guiding me like a very nice kindergarten teacher.

And me? Well, I found it very helpful indeed. It could be long-term COVID symptoms. Or more likely those untested and possibly lethal vaccinations. But the natural declination of my mental capabilities has become steeper in the past 12 to 18 months. To the point where it’s difficult for me to give the attention needed to read an electronic flight schedule board or find my seat number on my boarding pass.

I’ve always been absentminded. Which is why I don’t feel uncomfortable when Ms K or the kids notice that I’m not paying attention to what I should be. They worry that it’s early-onset dementia, but that doesn’t scare me. I’ve always told them that as long as I’m not soiling myself or in evident pain, I’m fine.

It’s actually reassuring to have Ms K tending to me so solicitously. I couldn’t blame her, after all she’s been through with me over these past 45 years, if she let me wander off into a crowded foreign airport one day, never to return.

That said… I want to catch you up on the rest of our stay in Poland.

After three days in Warsaw, we took a train to Krakow and spent four days there.

Krakow, like Warsaw, has its own rich history, including being next to several of the largest concentration and extermination camps of the Third Reich. We spent a day touring Auschwitz, which felt like something we should do. It did not evoke in me the feelings some of my friends have reported after being there. I think that was because I’ve been several times to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, which was, for me, more edifying and considerably more moving.

Most of the tours at the camps we visited were comprised of slowly following an uninterrupted train of people that the museum’s planners had engineered to tread through at least a mile of corridors with nothing to see except blown-up posters of what had taken place in the buildings we were in. I am tempted to say that if you are in Krakow, you should avoid this “must-see” destination (as well as Schindler’s ceramic factory, which features much the same experience). But in the second half of the Auschwitz tour, I was strongly moved by seeing the cement cells into which the SS crammed prisoners so tightly that they had to sleep (and defecate) standing up. I won’t soon forget it. It changed me in some way.

The other two days in Krakow were taken up with doing all the recommended tourist things. And they were very good and gratifying, as such “traps” always are. There is a reason they end up being cultural clichés.

But what I want to tell you about Poland is this. If you haven’t gone, you should. It is an amazingly (to me, at least) clean and beautiful country, with an engaging culture, a fascinating history, and a citizenry that, though not disarmingly warm like the denizens of Italy, Greece, and Turkey, are nevertheless friendly and very good at making tourists feel welcome.

What else? Some generalizations…

Poles are, for the most part, a strong and sturdy race. Most of the Polish men I encountered had thick forearms, forelegs, and necks. They reminded me of my friend Ziggy, whose last name is almost entirely spelled with consonants. Polish men are not generally Fred Astaire or Rob Lowe handsome, but they could be competitive in a pulchritude contest with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As for the women, I can’t claim to have worked up a defensible generality because there are so many damn tourists in Warsaw and Krakow that I couldn’t be sure. But my guess is that, like most countries where the population is racially homogeneous, they are good looking in the way the men are good looking.

The Poles are a proud people. Not proud in a condescending way like the French, but proud in the way Americans used to feel proud of being American, before we discovered we were the most racist, homophobic, and xenophobic nation in the world. You can feel the pride when they talk about the beauty of their cities and countryside (undeniable) and their history of hundreds of years of suffering under German and Russian oppression. They don’t brag. But they don’t apologize either.

They are big beer drinkers and reasonably big eaters. But their cuisine is pretty much what you would expect it to be. A bit too heavy on the meat and potatoes and not much interested in marinades and sauces and the like.

As a whole, they support Ukraine. But not because they are left-leaning like so many Americans. They lived through Communism for many years and are happy to be done with it. But the memory of the German occupation and their anti-Polish racial doctrines are still very much alive in their memories. (Fact: Half of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis were Polish.)

They have many admirable qualities that perhaps they inherited from their occupiers. They are organized and efficient like the Germans. And they are durable and fun-loving like the Russians.

There is, however, one thing they have that needs to be fixed ASAP. Their orthography. Like the Slavs and the Germans, their lexicographers of the past were disdainful of vowels. Which means it is absolutely impossible to have a glimmer of a chance of understanding anything posted on the street or on a menu. It’s just a morass of Cs and Ts and Vs.

But if you are a tourist and favor recommended tourist spots as I do, you don’t have to worry about that. There is always a big, sturdy, somewhat handsome man or woman around that will be happy to advise you in English.

How to Write a Book About Your Family History 

For the past few years, my friend (and coeval) HB has been thinking about writing down his family’s story.

His parents and many of his uncles and aunts were holocaust survivors. He began collecting information and photos and clippings about them several decades ago. I’ve seen a smattering of his collection. It’s impressive. Daunting. Inspiring.

Several years after he began his research, I started digging into my (and K’s) family history. My sister D did much of the initial research, interviewing some of the relatives. I hired a young writer to follow up on D’s work. I even traveled to Ireland to meet some of my cousins on my mother’s side.

Worth noting if you do this: Your European (or whatever) family has probably NOT been breathlessly waiting for their American cousins to visit them all these years. You may get the chilly reception I got from my second cousin (once removed) when I tracked him down.

Act One, Scene One: Hero is knocking on a thick wooden door, the front entrance of a thatched-roof house on a hill overlooking the bogs.

Hero: Hi! Are you John Curran?

John Curran (eyebrows furrowed): Yes, that would be me.

Hero (huge smile): Fantastic! I’m Mark Ford, your long-lost cousin from America!

John Curran: So?

The Ford/ Fitzgerald family history is rich with names, birth dates, marriage certificates, and death notices of hundreds of descendants. There are some details as to locations and occupations. Even some wonderful stories. But those stories don’t compare to what HB has compiled. So I wasn’t surprised to get an email from him recently, telling me that he was determined to put all that he’s gathered into a book of some kind.

“I’ve decided I should go ahead write it down,” he said. “But I have this tremendous blockage of even starting to put it into words. My wife tells me I shouldn’t try to think it through before I begin. She says I should just start writing one story or profile and go from there. But I lack the confidence to do justice to the information. I also know that it will be lost if I do not. Any suggestions?”

I told him that I thought his wife’s advice was very good. “Since you are not an experienced writer and/ or biographer,” I said, “it’s best NOT to try to plan it all out in the beginning, however tempting that might feel. That’s just a subconscious tactic for putting it off until it’s too late. It’s better to do exactly what she says. Start with one person or one story, write it down, and then move on from there. However, if I were in your shoes (no writing experience and still busy with my life), I’d begin by hiring a genealogist to help put together the family tree. It’s not difficult if you have enough information, which I think you do. And when that’s complete, I would hire a professional biographer/ ghostwriter and work with him or her to turn that tree into a family history.”

For anyone reading this who would like to do some genealogical research on their own, here’s some information to get you started:

The difference between genealogy and family history 

Genealogy is the study of family ancestors with pertinent data such as birth, marriage, and death dates. Family history is an in-depth study of a family lineage with greater emphasize on and clarification of each ancestor’s life story.

The basic process  

Start by going back to your grandparents (four individuals), your great grandparents (eight individuals), and then your great, great grandparents (16 individuals). Going back to your great, great grandparents would place their birth lineage to the 1820 to1830 timeframe. Go back another hundred years to the 1730s and you have your great-great-great-great great grandparents. And they alone number 128 people. Which means there are many individuals to track and locate information about to create a full family history.

The role of DNA testing 

From the NYT: “In America, the question of ‘Where am I from?’ usually means, ‘Where did my family live before they arrived/ were forcibly shipped to America?’ Recently, there’s been a push to answer that question through DNA tests, which claim they can tell us exactly what percentage Norwegian or Nigerian we are. But there are catches. The tests can compromise our privacy, with the possibility that our genetic information could be sold to third parties without our knowledge. And they don’t truly reveal our origins so much as reveal who has similar DNA right now. Also, and perhaps more important: Culture does not come from DNA. It comes from lived experience, traditions, and stories passed down from actual people who shape our perceptions of the world.” To read the full NYT article, click here.

New resources, services, and options are added regularly on popular genealogy sites, including FamilySearch.org, a very large and very helpful free site. Also check out Ancestry.com and Archives.com.

My Three Favorite Pleasures

There was a time, when I was young, that I thought the only sensible objective in life should be to get the best ratio possible between pleasure and pain. Put more simply: to avoid everything that was difficult or even uncomfortable, while spending the maximum amount of time having “fun.”

But when boys become men, as St. Paul famously said, they must put away childish things. In my case, it was the pursuit of hedonism.

Well, it wasn’t exactly like that. Over many years, I gradually recognized that those things I thought would give me maximum pleasure (more money, more TV time, newer toys, nicer things) had surprisingly short shelf lives. And as I grew older and fell into doing – under mandates – those things that, as a child, I was trying to avoid (work and school, mostly), I discovered activities that gave me better and longer lasting pleasure.

In my twenties and thirties, I indulged in the working and learning experiences I enjoyed, while also seeking the more standard pleasures. But I noticed that if I spent too much time indulging in those (mostly social) pleasures, the good I got from them lessened – i.e., there was a point of diminishing returns.

Sometime in my forties, I began to become aware of the many ironies of life, including the fact that it is almost impossible to have more pleasure by trying to have more pleasure. The more you chase after it, the farther it moves ahead of you.

I’m not making an argument for asceticism. I still believe that it makes good sense to strive for a life that is more pleasurable than painful. I’m merely saying that once I realized that (a) I couldn’t have more pleasure by trying to have more pleasure, and (b) lots of things that I used to think of as difficult and/or painful could be very pleasurable indeed, I was able to look at this ratio from the perspective of my actual experience, rather than the images of pleasure manufactured to sell things.

I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. At least 20 years. I’ve written about it, too, in books and essays, in which I sometimes tried to categorize the types of pleasure in terms of quality, durability, and so on. And that’s all been helpful – to me, if not to my readers.

Then, about a year ago, I was looking over some of those books and essays, trying to find a common thread. And I think I did. For me, there have always been three – and only three – good and worthy pleasures. They are:

* Working towards an objective I value.

* Learning about a subject I think is important.

* Sharing my knowledge and the fruits of my labor.

That’s it. Three. Working. Learning. And sharing.

Working 

“We were created for meaningful work, and one of life’s greatest pleasures is the satisfaction of a job well done.” – John C. Maxwell

I discovered the pleasure I get from working before I understood that what I was doing was working. As a boy and through my teenage years, I enjoyed the normal boyish pastimes like playing sandlot football and sneaking into movie theaters. But my greatest pleasure came from working alone in the basement of my house, building miniature towns, choreographing war scenes with little plastic soldiers, and building real structures out of plywood to serve as forts and hideaways or as hospitals for injured birds and frogs and insects.

I also loved to start clubs. As an 11-year-old, I created the He-Man-Women-Haters club. In high school, I was president of a group of troublemakers in the guise of a fraternity.

Looking back on those activities, and comparing them to the things I did “for fun,” I see now that I preferred the building and organizing because they mattered to me in a way that playing sandlot football never could.

That’s still true today. I tried to retire three times in the last 30 years, and went back to work each time because I missed the deep and lasting pleasure of working on the many things I used to do that I truly cared about.

Working on things that I value. That was and still is key. (That’s why I write this blog.)

Learning 

“The greatest pleasure is obtained by improving.” – Ben Hogan

 I enjoyed school through fourth grade, but not again until I was in college. And even then, I didn’t always enjoy my classes. In retrospect, I can see that my favorites were those that I felt would somehow make me a more valuable person. And by valuable, I don’t mean financially valuable – knowing things or having skills that would earn me big money sometime in the future. Literature, anthropology, history, etc. were the kind of subjects that were valued in the house I grew up in. I think that’s why I got so much pleasure out of studying them.

I recognize how helpful it would be if I knew more about technical things. Like how to reset my watch. Or how to increase the bandwidth (or whatever it is) of my WiFi when I’m on important Zoom calls. And I’ve tried. I really have. But I just can’t persuade the judge in the corner of my brain that knowing these sorts of things will make me a more valuable person.

Sharing 

“A writer’s greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too.” – Andy Rooney

I was talking to a friend last week about this little theory. He understood the pleasure I get from working on and learning about things I value. But he questioned me about the sharing. Sharing, he felt, is really just an obligation. A responsibility. Something you do out of a sense of duty, not as a potential source of pleasure.

“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that sharing what I have, whether it’s my house, my toys, or my money, is probably the truest pleasure I get. And it can be expressed in so many ways. In fact, when I first sat down to write this essay, I had a fourth activity on my list of good and worthy pleasures: teaching. But after thinking about it for five minutes, I realized that the reason I like teaching is because it is a form of sharing.”

I don’t know how to categorize what I’ve just written. Is it a manifesto? A sermon?

It doesn’t feel like that to me. I swear. It feels like sharing!

The August 23 Debate: Two Perspectives

I didn’t get to watch the debate, but I watched several dozen clips and a half-dozen retrospective reviews. This one from The Dispatch highlighted something that so many people on both sides of the aisle don’t want to accept:

On Trump’s Indictments, There Was No Debate 

“When the Fox News broadcast returned from commercial, co-anchor Bret Baier asked for a show of hands: Who onstage would still support Trump as the GOP nominee if he is convicted of a crime? All the candidates, save former Govs. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, raised their hands.

“Most, when given the opportunity to explain themselves, went after the ‘weaponization’ of the Justice Department and ‘political’ prosecutions. None of the remaining candidates made any arguments that the charges against Trump in any of the four jurisdictions where he’s been indicted disqualify the former president, and Vivek Ramaswamy even challenged his rivals to follow his lead and commit to pardoning Trump if elected president. (Mike Pence was not amused.)

“It was a remarkable collective decision by the field not to use the frontrunner’s chief vulnerability against him. It reflects the broad conventional wisdom, which GOP strategists working for these campaigns espouse, that loyalty to Trump is itself a litmus test for primary voters.”

You can read the full review here.

And for another perspective, there’s this from Olivia Reingold in The Free Press.

I think both pieces made good points. But the elephant in the room – the fact that none of Trump’s adversaries (Republicans and Democrats) don’ t want to acknowledge – is that the indictments haven’t worked as planned. If anything, they have expanded Trump’s lead, and nobody knows what to do about that.

The Growing Problem of Homelessness in the US

The US experienced an astonishingly large increase in homelessness in 2022. It went up a record-breaking 11%, That’s the highest it’s been since 2019, when the increase was a comparatively modest 2.7%.

Some politicians and government officials are blaming it on the rising cost of housing and increase in evictions. That could be a factor, but it can’t possibly be the main cause. All the research I’ve seen indicates that somewhere between 60% and 80% of the homeless are drug-addicted and/or mentally disturbed. Moving them into shelters is at best a temporary solution because so many of them prefer to live in the streets. (And say so, when asked.)

My view: The homeless problem will never be solved until two things happen.

1. We recognize that homelessness is not an economic problem but a mental health and addiction problem.
2. We understand that homelessness is a very substantial, very profitable, multibillion-dollar industry, and that few people in that industry want to see the problem solved.

Click here.

The Economics of Illegal Immigration

Since Trump first promised to build a wall, immigration into the US via our southern border has become a costly and amazingly stupid political slugfest.

First, there were Trump’s “kids in cages.”

After Biden took over, it was “even more kids in cages.”

Then it was Biden’s overnight deliveries of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens to towns and cities (especially Republican-run cities) all over the country.

Then it was border-state governors shipping tens of thousands of immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard and other “sanctuary” cities.

Then it was the good people of the Vineyard quickly rounding up and incarcerating the immigrants.

Then it was the mayors of “sanctuary” cities publicly complaining about the cost of taking care of the sanctuary seekers flooding into their jurisdictions.

And now we have the Biden administration, apparently in response to complaints from

Democrat mayors, claiming to have drastically slowed the inflow by reinstating some of the programs initiated under Trump.

If this has worked – if there has been a significant drop in the number of illegal immigrants coming into the US – it hasn’t yet shown up in the published data.

According to figures compiled at Syracuse University, about 670,000 immigrants were let into the US in the first six months of this year. If the Biden administration has indeed slowed the inflow, we will be able to measure that by looking at year-end numbers. (How much less than 1.3 million undocumented aliens had been let in.)

NYC’s Mayor Adams isn’t happy. About 67,000 (10%) of the 670,000 undocumented aliens that came into the country in the first six months of 2023 ended up in his city. Its population, at 8.2 million, is only about 2.5% of America’s total population. And Adams doesn’t think it’s fair for them to have to take 10% of the burden.

About 90,000 migrants have settled in NYC since 2022, according to the Mayor’s Office, with 57,200 of them living in about 200 shelters. So, Adams is asking for help. Specifically, he’s asked for $300 million from FEMA to help cover the full cost of the crisis, which is projected to be $4.2 billion.

$4.2 billion? That sounds like a lot. But is it really? For a city with 8.2 million inhabitants, half of whom are taxpayers?

Let’s see: $4.2 billion divided by about 60,000 is about $70,000 per immigrant. And $4.2 billion divided by 4.1 million is about $1,100 per taxpayer. Did I do that right? Only $1,100 per taxpayer? What is Adams complaining about?

In any case, the whole mess is a good thing from Mexico’s perspective. Dollars sent to Mexican citizens from Mexicans living in the US have been an important part of Mexico’s GDP for a long time. And thanks to the two years of easy entry on the border, revenues from Mexicans in the US to friends and family members in Mexico increased from $33.5 billion in 2018 to $60 billion in 2023. Anyone want to call immigration a new industry? Click here.

Shameless Self-Promotion!

K and I are spending a quiet week at our place in Rancho Santana after a very busy week in Cancun with 40+ members of our extended family. I mentioned on Aug. 11 that we call these biannual events Cousin Camps because, when we started them, about 30 years ago, they were meant less to reunite our coevals but to give our children and nieces and nephews the chance to develop close bonds – something my childhood lacked.

Cancun was a blast, a party. Rancho Santana is a recovery zone – quiet, peaceful, luxurious.

J, my editor, is growing impatient with my continued pieces about Rancho Santana. She sees them as shameless plugs, and perhaps they are. But I have no personal ambition to sell any more property here. I write about this place because when I come down here, I continue to be blown away by it.

This is especially relevant for me now because a small group of property owners have objected to the resort’s increased fees. They are doing their best to get us to lower fees across the board or make exemptions for them. That’s not going to happen. Not only because the increase was correctly done, but because the higher fees are still much lower than they would be in any other resort of this quality anywhere in the world.

About ten years ago, when I was running Rancho Santana, it was, at best, a 3-star resort. But then two of my partners took over the management and initiated a master plan to turn it into what it is today: an award-winning 5-star resort.

It cost the development partners tens of millions more dollars than the tens of millions we had already invested. And while the investment hasn’t been paid back yet, we are more than happy with the result. We now have one of the 100 best resort hotels in the world, and probably the number one resort in Central America.

Here are a few reasons why:

* The property is vast at 2,800 acres. (It takes about 20 minutes to drive through.) And it is beautiful, consisting of hills and valleys, cliffs and beaches, forests and flatland, and two rivers, one on either end.

* The property has five beaches, including a tree-shaded cove, a beach that stretches out from a 30-foot sand dune, two long beaches that are perfect for surfing, and one, perhaps the prettiest one, that you cannot find without a guide. It’s called Escondido (Hidden) Beach.

* Rancho Santana offers visitors a range of housing options – from 18 ocean-view rooms in an elegant seaside inn at the heart of the community, to 60 luxury apartments, also looking at the sea, to several dozen beautifully decorated private residences with million-dollar views.

* The resort offers every sort of recreational activity one could hope for, including horseback, hiking, and mountain bike trails; tennis and pickleball courts; ocean swimming, surfing, and snorkeling; boating and fishing; nature walks; yoga on top of a hill overlooking a forest and onto the beach; a 5-star spa; bocce ball, horseshoe, and cornhole courts by the main pool and outdoor bar.

Residents and guests can also use the sports center at FunLimón, which includes a soccer field, a baseball field, a full court basketball facility, a fully equipped gym, and a martial arts dojo.

* The maintenance of the resort is full-service, fast, and invisible. Everything is taken care of automatically and discreetly. You rarely run into workers, and yet they are working day and night. (In this respect, Rancho Santana remind me of Disneyland!)

* Rancho Santana has three restaurants – formal dining at the Club House, a tapas restaurant atop a beautiful small cove, and a taqueria on the family-oriented beach at its southern border. If you prefer to eat at home, you can order meals from the main restaurant, or you can purchase food and drinks at the “tienda,” which is also stocked with everything else you could possibly need.

All of these amenities are of a quality you’d expect from a Four Seasons Resort in Switzerland or Paris. In addition, Rancho Santana offers something in abundance that is not as prevalent in other 5-star resorts. I’m talking about the demeanor of the staff. Nicaraguans are, by nature and/or culture, warm and welcoming.

What else?

Did I mention that Rancho Santana is safe? Very safe. It is located in the midst of a string of small beachside towns and hamlets that are as safe as any small town in the US. Plus, the resort has a sophisticated electronic security system, as well as dozens of guards and security personnel that, like the maintenance folks that keep everything functioning smoothly, seem to do their jobs invisibly.

K and I have been to dozens of 5-star vacation resorts all over the world, but I think Rancho Santana must be the best. As I said, every time I come here, I am blown away by how great this place is. How big. How beautiful. How easy, friendly, luxurious, and safe. And the cost – whether you are a guest or a property owner – is cheap compared to any resort that is remotely as good.

For more information about Rancho Santana, click here.