Over the weekend over 40 events really saw the end of Scotland’s Homecoming Year. As you will remember this was a year long celebration of things Scottish and a determined effort to draw people back to their roots. It was almost an attempt to woo people back much as the Irish have successfully done. The timing, though this couldn’t have been planned, gave Scotland a strong tourism appeal whilst other countries laboured to attract visitors. With St Andrew’s Day today heralding the official end, it is probably too early to say how successful it was although that hasn’t stopped people from hailing it as a runaway success.

Madness have been singing about London for 30 years and now the group’s frontman, Suggs, has written a book about his top spots in the English capital. CD Traveller thought it was about time we shared a few of our own favourites…

In the last week or so both Cumbria and Dubai have been hit by disasters of different sorts. As you will all know, Cumbria has been hit by some of the worst floods in memory and Dubai by a financial crisis which few thought would ever happen. Both are heavily dependent on tourism and both have been quick to say that both are open for business.

CD Traveller spoke to James Lohan, one half of Mr & Mrs Smith, about hotels, holidays and his aims for the future…

If you haven’t already had enough of the hard sell that no frills airlines hit you with when you check-in and board their planes, then be prepared because more could be coming. Luckily it won’t be soon because the latest new advertising idea is only occurring on an American airline called AirTran.

In Ireland, Budget Travel is the tour operator. At one point, it carried over a third of all Irish holidaymakers who went abroad which probably amounted to over 400,000 people per year. On Wednesday evening they called in the liquidators.

As in the UK, there is a bonding system operated by the Commission for Aviation Regulation (CAR) so most, if not all of the money put down by holidaymakers will be protected.

Those of you who have paid deposits or have fully paid need to download an 8 page claim form which can be found at www.aviationnreg.ie. On the website, click on the release about Budget Travel and the click on claim.

VAT is charged on nearly everything. And when you stay at a hotel 17.5% is payable by the hotel to the tax coffers. It is a uniform tax payable wherever you are in our countries unlike the United States where taxes vary state by state. But In France, the VAT on visiting attractions is only 5.5% and from the beginning of 2010, Germany will only charge hotels 7% VAT instead of the normal 19%.

Now 40 British M.P’s have signed a motion calling on our government to cut the VAT that accommodation providers and attractions pay.

Starting today, the EU will consult with the travel industry over the next 8 weeks before coming up with new proposals on giving greater protection to travellers.

That headline could be considered to be the announcement of a horror movie. It isn’t but there is an invasion. For those of you who have been to San Francisco, one of the touristy things to do is to go to Pier 39 and watching the sea lions basking on some low level wooden docks. The occasional scraps and growls as another tries to take over the space of another gives photo opportunities for visitors as the 10-20 sea lions swam around.

This year the numbers have increased. The last estimate is 1,585. And that number of sea lions takes up a lot of space. So much space that adjoining marinas and other piers have been invaded.

Why the massive numbers?

Travel writer and photographer, Anthony Lydekker, shares his experience of Latvia with CD-Traveller readers. (for Anthony’s earlier story on Latvia see 9 November 2010)

About a quarter of a flight missed a flight from Liverpool to Belfast last Sunday because the gate changed and the passengers were unaware of this. Apparently, according to the BBC, the passengers rushed to the new gate to find that the pilot denied them boarding. Passengers were told they would have to pay extra to return to Belfast so who is to blame for this PR mess.
Liverpool Airport doesn’t make announcements so is it due to them for not making it clear to passengers? Is it the fault of the Servisair, who handle Ryanair flights at the airport and who should have wondered why 42 checked-in passengers all didn’t turn up

Redcoats, buffets, bingo, bungee trampolines… it’s fair to say that Butlins has suffered from something of an image problem. But this season, the budget seaside holiday camp has had a huge new lift with the opening of the £20 million Ocean Hotel. CD Traveller reports…

Did we really need the official figures from the Office of National Statistics to tell us that fewer of us holidayed abroad this summer? Up until the end of September we took 14% fewer holidays abroad than 2008. It may not seem a lot but that equates to 9.8 million fewer visits. (A visit can be a day trip to Dublin or Calais as well as a holiday or a short break). But if you look at the figures for the main three months between July and September overseas visits dropped by just 1% and that, I think, is the key result. In the main holiday period, the number of us going abroad hardly altered.

Sturgeon versus Condor and Bock & Others versus Air France isn’t on your bedtime reading list but if you fly you should be aware of them. A European Court of Justice ruling on Thursday confirmed that if your flight is delayed 3 hours or more you are entitled to compensation. Although there are 73 clauses in the judgement it can be summarised fairly easily. But the interpretation wrapped around the words still requires you to probably seek expert guidance.

It is pretty well known that in fourteen hundred and ninety two, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. What is not so well known is that he was British and a knight no less.

A company called Amadeus, one of the companies that provides the technology allowing travel agents to book your holidays in shops, has conducted some research which, it claims, highlights the growth of the traveller who can almost rival travel agents.

They didn’t really go that far but say that certain people have such a grasp of the internet and where to locate information that they could be called experts.

Why should this be a surprise? We have always had amateurs who know as much about subjects as experts do. Unless the expert has visited every place on earth, there will always be someone that has been somewhere the expert hasn’t or spotted something the expert has overlooked.

British Airways has announced its list of 10 destinations that it thinks will influence you to decide where to go on your holidays next year. In any list like this you have to bear a couple of things in mind, the first being that BA flies to all the destinations it suggests and therefore that may have influenced the list. Secondly it is subjective. We don’t know how these places got on the list. Probably some “expert” decided or it coincided with a new or improved service to that destination by BA. I could be completely wrong there but, as I said, who knows. Still it is interesting to se whether our ideas match those of BA.

The list is Cape Town, Istanbul, Las Vegas, Vancouver, Punta Cana (Dominican Republic), Dubrovnik, New York, Stockholm, the Maldives and Delhi.

Looking to escape to sunnier climes without forking out a fortune? If you want to get more than you paid for, you need to do your homework. Paris Hilton travel at Paris Travelodge prices? Here’s how…

With Fiji’s National Day having fallen on October 25, CD Traveller thought it was time to let you in on eight great things to see and do in this archipelago of over 300 islands in the south west Pacific

Initially one of the travel sectors that bucked the downward trend was that of cruising. On the face of it, the reasons seem obvious. Everything’s included in the price so you know what you are paying for and you paid in sterling so there were no nasty foreign exchange surprises. That didn’t necessarily turn out to be the truth as we mentioned earlier and some cruise business slumped. One part that remained resilient was where holidaymakers started their cruising from the UK. According to Gill Cruise Centre, just of half a million of us started a cruise in the UK, 20% over 2008. Of the bookings Gill made in 2009, over two thirds decided to start their cruise in the UK.

The future of holidays and tourism was one of the last parts of World Travel Market last week.

We had heard a lot about going green, value for money and the need to bring on more hotel rooms and offers for the middle market. Woe betide expansion into the luxury end of the market. The thinking was that more 3 and 4 star hotels were needed. And if the destination isn’t green and pitching strongly for sustainability then tourists would stay away. More travellers would book through packages because that gave them security in these economic times.

Last month we let you in on 25 fabulous, free travel attractions. Here at CD Traveller, we like to give our readers something extra and our generosity of spirit means that this month we’re revealing a further 25. To paraphrase Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross, “the best things in life really are free.”

You’ll be aware about my previous thoughts on car hire and car hire companies. You need to be wary as they try to ratchet up the basic price they use to lure you in to rent their cars. But they have another sneaky approach. When you hire a car in the UK, you pay for any damage up to the first three hundred pounds or whatever it is and then you can pay a daily sum to reduce that figure.

You all know that brown signs are there to make it easier for the visitor to find and thus, visit tourism sites and attractions. Getting them can prove a lengthy process in some cases and it isn’t cheap. Two stories have surfaced in the last couple of months about the slipshod way the system appears to be working – or not working in Wales.

This weekend two events are taking place, neither of which will probably affect the train passenger. The significance may only be transitory but significant it is. One is the end of National Express on the east coast line up to Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland and the other is the birthday of Eurostar.
I use the east coast line a lot. According to my National Express account records, I have made 18 return trips so far this year to places both for business and pleasure.

A team of novice and experienced explorers alike recently became the first people to walk the Skeleton Coast of Namibia – one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Jason De Carteret, one of the 14 explorers, tells us about the trip…

A spokesman from TUI (the owners of Thomson and First Choice) said this week that if a bird swims, quacks, waddles and looks like a duck then it must be a duck. The courts think otherwise. Most of you will never have heard of a company called Travel Republic but the result of a court action against it by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) might actually help travellers with better consumer protection for our flights and holidays.

What to see and do in Cardiff