For those of you living in the London you are about to be deluged by Taiwanese advertising as they try and persuade more of us to visit their country. Only about 45,000 of us currently visit Taiwan each year and they want more of us to go there. So, for the next 6 weeks or so, you’ll not only see posters at tube stations you’ll also see 75 taxis carrying the same message, visit Taiwan.
They are using the slogan, “Where else but Taiwan,” as they try to get across the fact that they are not very well known.

Last November there was a further increase in the Air Passenger Duty (APD) we UK based flyers pay. Next November it will go up yet again. In Ireland a similar tax is blamed by Ryanair for a substantial fall in the number of people visiting there and its decision to maintain quite so many planes at Dublin. It has concerned some countries that their tourism is being affected so the Netherlands has abolished the tax.
The UK is one of the most heavily taxed, if not the most heavily one for airline flights. But it doesn’t only hit people in the UK. Because of the high cost, overseas countries that rely on tourism for substantial national income are worried we won’t travel there.

For the second year in a row, readers polled by Wanderlust magazine have named the West Highland Railway the world’s best railway journey which runs from Glasgow to Mallaig. This is how the BBC ran the results of the Wanderlust annual survey into what its readers preferred. They omitted to mention the other awards. It was, unfortunately, the only category in which a UK destination or attraction won a top award. (I don’t include best UK Airport which, obviously, had to be won by a UK entrant! Incidentally, the winner was London City)
The readers of Wanderlust are an adventurous bunch so don’t expect your average destination to featur

Up until recently, if you had milk in a hotel room or on a plane they gave you a little bucket of it. The foil top had a pull-off part and either this came off as you tried to open it or you managed to get the milk sprayed over you. Or you put your finger in through the foil and splashed the milk over yourself, the tray or your neighbour.
Obviously, someone decided to come up with a new container to hold milk and the tube was born. You’ve probably seen them. They’re like the containers that hold coffee in hotel rooms. At one end is a tear off edge in order to make it easier for you get at the milk. Except that when you tear it, the pressure in the tube often results in a jet of milk going over your tray, your clothing or your foot depending on the power of the jet. It’s called a Dairystix of all things

I automatically think of 3 places in our countries when I think of Vikings; the Isle of Man, Orkney, Dublin and York. Were they a rampaging bunch of blonde warriors bent on raping and pillaging as the Horrible Histories tell us or is there more than that?
Yes that isn’t the total story. As usual it is more complicated but mixing the truth with what people think is a great way of attracting people to your event and none is better than the Jorvik Viking Centre in linking the two.

Last week Air New Zealand announced that they were introducing 22 almost flat beds for economy class passengers. BMI said that they were doing away with first and business class flights on some routes and Qantas says it is scrapping about 20% of its first class seats. Are we beginning to see the end or the decline of first class seats on flights?
Certainly over the last twelve months or so, when I’ve walked through first class cabins there have been few people in them. In business class, numbers have been light

This year sees a lot of anniversaries being celebrated in Wiltshire. Ask people what they know about the county and they might come up with Salisbury, Salisbury Plain, Longleat and Stonehenge. It suffers from being a county that the M4 goes through and many times that is as much as a tourist sees. Yet the motorway only cuts through the northern fringes so the farmland that they see from the road says little about the county.
But this year you’ll hear a lot more about it.

As I mentioned yesterday, apart from the consumer travel shows, there isn’t much going on to attract those of us who are dreaming of breaks from this cold winter. (more snow overnight here on ungritted roads!) It’s just as well then that one of the consumer shows is the best, the Destinations Show which takes place this weekend at Earls Court in London and then in a month’s time, reappears in Birmingham at the NEC. A general travel show, it covers all sorts of destinations and types of holidays and links it in with background on culture and food.