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

Another country to major on its past is Greece as typified by the slogan (the headline above) that they will be running on the advertising early next year. But as with any successful tourist destination Greece blends the old with the modern. With a history and the remains of buildings going back millennia, part of everyday life is that almost wherever you try and put up a new building or a pipeline you hit Greece’s cultural past. (That would make Channel 4’s Time Team envious!)

This may not be your first choice of destinations and, we have to confess, that we have never covered Iraq before in CD-traveller (except about the loss of items from the Iraqi National Museum) but the time has come. What has sparked this interest is that Iraq exhibited for the first time in a decade at World Travel Market. Even the BBC picked this up and ran a story about it on “Breakfast” this morning.