Top 10 Valentine’s breaks

Boutique hotel experts Mr & Mrs Smith have sifted through the schmaltz to find Valentine’s packages that will really set hearts aflutter (and won’t involve soggy petals clogging the plughole). Here are 10 hot properties that offer something a little bit different…

A day in… Dundee

Dundee is transforming its waterfront, to draw visitors in. Adrian looks at what there is for the short break tripper

Air Transport Users Council

see Civil Aviation Authority.
The AUC was wound up in March 2011.

Richmond: more than a Civil War destination

In the year of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil war, Adrian visits the capital of the confederacy, Richmond in Virginia

Lufthansa Strike Starts Monday 22nd February

For any of you flying on Lufthansa this week you should check with the airline about your flight. The pilots union is striking for 4 days and something like 1,200 flights out of 1,800 will be cancelled each day so not every flight is affected. A number of flights from Birmingham, Dublin, London City, Heathrow, Manchester and Newcastle to German destinations will be flying but you need to check the Lufthansa website, www.lufthansa.com, to see if they are still scheduled to fly. This also affects their Germanwings subsidiary,
Lufthansa has issued a special flight schedule during this week and you will find a link to this on the home page on their website. As we all know with strikes, things can change at the last minute so check as well just before you leave for the airport.
If your flight is cancelled, Lufthansa will refund your money or rebook you, free of charge, to another date.

Criticising Ryanair

This has almost become a national pastime and I have contributed to quite a bit of it myself when it is deserved which is more often than not.

But when the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) criticises them (which isn’t as often as they should), you would hope they got their facts correct. Just one fact wrong and Ryanair will attack which is precisely what has just happened.

It began when John Fingleton, the chief executive of the OFT criticised the airline for only allowing one type of credit card to be used for payment that didn’t attract any sort of Ryanair fee. (This card is actually a pre-paid card so is it technically a credit card?)

A journey through Vietnam: part 4

Aidan Lawes gives us the low-down on Hanoi, Halong Bay and Sa Pa – the final part of his journey around Vietnam