This weekend is the weekend for a number of festivals. Edinburgh finishes, Reading starts today as does Notting Hill. But there is another that transcends all these.

I am talking of the Pennine Lancashire Festival of Food & Culture which takes place in Rossendale this weekend. (www.penninelancashirefestivals.com) In particular I am talking of an event taking place tomorrow on bank holiday Monday. The World Gravy Wrestling Championships.

Estimates vary on the number of people who are flying on a bank holiday break this weekend in addition to all the other flyers but it will be over 2 million. During the summer period maybe 15 million will have gone abroad.

Well it’s the last one before Christmas, the last one before nearly four months without a break. This always seems a long time to me so I always arrange an Autumn break to relieve the continuous onset of winter.

But before winter starts there is this one to enjoy..

Network rail announced an idea for a new high speed train route that would travel from London and linking Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Birmingham could be reached in 46 minutes, Liverpool in 83, Manchester in 66, Glasgow in 136 and Edinburgh in 129.

The media has been reporting signs of an economic recovery and some claim the recession is over. For tourists this is a double edged sword. On the one hand it means that there are better deals to be found during hard economic times. On the other have we the money to take advantage of it. When things improve prices rise as companies try to restore their profit margins.

We are used to the idea of four seasons and in the summer, summer holidays. But why 4? Why not more?
Dr Tim Entwisle who is director of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Australia suggests more seasons arguing that the idea of 4 seasons doesn’t fit in with how the climate in Australia is. He suggests [...]

Truck drivers were a fairly easily described group. T-shirt wearing with copies of the Sun in the front of their dashboards who are casually dressed in clothes, stubble and manner. Then along came Eddie Stobart drivers and their green trucks. They wore ties, dressed smartly and all the trucks were named after girls’ names. They got a reputation for good courteous driving and an Eddie Stobart driver was seen as a cut above the rest. But the company own more than trucks.
Now they own airports;- Southend and Carlisle.

Should you tip? When do you tip? Is it extortion under another name? Guide books offer tedious pages about it.
I offer no solution to help you at all. Sometimes I have tipped, sometimes I have refused and had the odd surly look. Sometimes I have insulted people by leaving a solitary penny because I was so annoyed and I thought that would annoy them as well.

In the old days, if you had a problem you complained in person or by letter or by telephone. The arrival of the internet allowed blogs and then social websites.

Twitter which sometimes seems no more than the virtual stalking of celebrities has provided a bonus and a problem for the travel industry. It is a bonus in that travel companies can put up last minute offers and thoughts secure in the knowledge that it will be quickly seen by followers.

Another survey, another dodgy conclusion.

This one comes from Teletext Holidays, via the travel trade magazine Travel weekly.

This says that when they asked 2000 children aged between 5 and 15 just under a quarter said that Disneyworld was their preferred destination. The next choice was Spain which was way behind with 8%.

We have the Hay-on-Wye, the Cheltenham and, at present, the literary side of the Edinburgh Festival but Heathrow? I exaggerate slightly because there is no festival but they do have a writer in residence. For this week only, as the old cinema posters used to say, Alain de Botton will be at Heathrow writing a book. This book will supposedly be called A Week at the Airport so it does seem apt.

We know there are all sorts of traveller. There are those who plan ahead and those who act impulsively; those that like lazy sun filled days and those who must forever active. Now an American business guru, Robert Bylett, who operates a business advisory company called Happy Business, has given advice to companies who have what he calls toxic customers.

Just capital
London comes alive in the summer; there is so much to see and do. However if you’re lacking the imagination to find something to keep you entertained, fret no longer. The CD Traveller team has come up with some suggestions to see you through the summer months…
Get into shape
Wheely great
We all love the feel [...]

I’m confused.

How big is London? I thought that it was a city astride the River Thames. When London Airport used to be at Croydon, it was easy; there was one airport.

It seems that the troubles in Sri Lanka are over so it won’t be before long that tourism steps up as well. Here is a country that promotes itself widely at travel trade shows and supports advertising its appeal but the new stories must have contributed to the lack of people going there.

Images are used to sell all sorts of things. Celebrities are used to promote items that you seriously wonder if they have ever tried. You can see a castle promoting California but at least that castle (the Hearst old home) is genuinely to be found there.
Not so with the case of Durdle Door.

If I am forced to carry hold luggage (which I prefer never to do unless my wife is with me and even she is getting better at just having carry on luggage) its because I am carrying presents for people at Christmas or paperwork. But not everything carried is so mundane.

There was a lot of comment earlier that this year that a lot of people would stay at home and have day trips.
This seems to be happening so certain places seem to be doing well as we visit them. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that historic houses on the eastern side of the country are doing well and now there is evidence that two other attractions are doing well.

Let me clear. I’m not a Twitter fan. I can’t see the value of telling people a couple of times a day that I am flossing my teeth in a lift or planning to visit an orphanage in deepest Mongolia. It seems to me that there are better things to do in life. Like living [...]

Brazil isn’t one of the countries that you might quickly think of if you were asked to name tourist destinations for the British. But it is becoming more popular and, last year, 181,000 people holidayed there from the UK. Now that may not be many in the grand scheme of things but according to the [...]

Starting in Plymouth is the annual extravaganza known as the British Firework Championships. This two day event down on the Hoe is a great draw for tourists and, given the weather over the last couple of weeks, summer tourism in the UK could do with a bit of a bang.

The grotty weather of the last fortnight or so has caused people to say hang it; lets go abroad rather than holiday in the UK. So it seems that both domestic and UK tourism will be pretty good for the trade this year. Those who had already booked a domestic holiday will have put down deposits so can’t or won’t want to change so that’s the reason why domestic holiday providers will be happy.

You have probably seen this story all over the press and TV in the last 24 hours. Lufthansa has decided to offer insurnace against it raining on your holiday. Book in the next 11 days on an economy flight going between September and the end of October and, if more than one tenth of an inch of rain falls (according to www.wetteronline.de, then you receive €20 per day for up to 10 days.
Now coming on the top of the Thomas Cook idea of letting the Germans pay up front for sun lounges that I mentioned a week or so ago, you could say that we are missing out again.

August can be a slack month for companies who provide travel and accommodation to businessmen so often there are deals, particularly by hotels, to offer discounts like 2 nights for the price of one.

When you buy your holiday do you pay the asking price? Do you shop around first?
The reason I ask is that there is another survey out, this time from Visa, those wonderful credit card people, who claim that from their survey of 1,077 people that 22% of us negotiate on the price and only 11% accepting the first price they are offered.

This is just a reminder. A reminder that the government has raised the price of passports to 77 pounds from 3rd September. This is a rise of just over 5 pounds but is the third such rise over the last few years.

People are satisfied with the airlines for a whole number of reasons; reliability, punctuality, easy check-ins, cabin crew service, the quality of how passengers are made to feel and a host of other things. Marrying no frills airlines to high customer satisfaction isn’t easy but some airlines, not many, achieve it. After all, the premise of a no frills airline is that if the fare is cheap enough, passengers come to the airline and nothing else matters.

Trivago is a hotel comparison website. They operate throughout Europe and recently asked people using their site about people’s worst hotel experience. The biggest complaint amongst those responding to their British website was finding bugs in their room. They don’t say what sort of bugs or their size but obviously we’d rather have bugs outside rather than in. And it was also the highest rated problem in the website answers from the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, France and Italy.