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.