The 2011 BVA-Gallup International survey showed the French to be the most pessimistic people on earth. However when it comes to travel, it turns out that it’s the Brits who are the sourpusses of the planet.

UPDATE: 30 Oct. Qantas has been ordered to re-start flights asap. At the same time, both the company and the unions have been ordered to neogtiate or face binding arbitration.

Homeless tour guides are showing tourists the grittier side of London life. The idea – the brainchild of Unseen Tours – allows visitors to the capital to see the street s of Shoreditch, Covent Garden, London Bridge, Mayfair and Brick Lane from, well the streets.

Let’s face it; holidays cost money. Most of us accept that and view the positive effects of having a holiday as worth it.

Heathrow airport has been ordered to pay a £500,000 penalty after an investigation revealed passenger queuing times at security checkpoints were longer than the London airport previously reported.

You’ve heard of the G20? Well there is also a T20, a group of twenty tourism ministers and yesterday they met in Paris to discuss you and me. Or eighteen of them did including our minister, John Penrose.
Why?

Yesterday I decided to book a flight. Half way through I decided to alter my flight times. Within seconds, and I mean seconds, I had a phone call on my mobile from a bmi call centre.

Sick of sleeping on hard chairs in an overcrowded departure lounge when in transit? Transferring passengers at Heathrow, can now take advantage of the UK’s first ever airside bedrooms.

If you’re driving through Warwickshire this morning you might see some road signs with tape across them. The word “Shakespeare” has been cunningly taped over. I say “cunningly” because it is still obvious what the word is underneath. Why?

Print media is the past and present and digital media is the present and future. That was the message that emerged from Whose Voice Is It Anyway –a CIMTIG seminar that took place at The Cumberland Hotel in London’s Marble Arch, last week.

You probably remember from lessons at school, Lord Lytton’s novel “The Last Days of Pompeii”or even the Frankie Howerd film, “Up Pompeii” the story of the city that was mostly covered in volcanic ash. Now the site is one of the great tourist “must-do’s.” But the way things are going it might be a “must don’t.”

The winter sports business has seen fewer skiers on the slope over the last few years (there were 911,000 UK skiers on the piste last season compared to 1.2 million in 2007/8), but you could have fooled me if the turn out the 2011 Ski & Snowboard Show was anything to go by.

So Colonel Gaddafi has gone but, despite the death of the desperate despot, the future isn’t especially rosy for Libya. Gaddafi might have gone to his grave but the nation faces a tough battle to win back holidaymakers – like much of the Middle East

The low budget airline that everyone loves to loathe is to get rid of a number of loos in each and every one of their aircrafts. Going forward, Ryanair planes will have only one loo on board, in a bid to make room for six extra seats.

www.sleepinginairports.net, which gathers advice and makes suggestions on how you can sleep at airports, has compiled a list.

Most people associate the word, air travel, with long queues, the ridiculous removal of shoes and belts, dehydration, seats that don’t recline and cantankerous cabin crew.

A little while go Thomson flew one engine on one flight on one plane on a mixture of Jet A1 fuel and waste cooking oil as opposed to normal aviation fuel. It was a test to see the effect but you would have thought from the reactions that they had almost single-handedly caused the starvation of millions by using a resource that stopped food crops being grown.

This weekend sees the opening at Glasgow’s SECC of the Cruise Show whilst next weekend, it moves to Birmingham. Congratulations to all you lucky ones who got free tickets. For the unsuccessful ones it is still possible to buy them in advance and claim the discount of £4.

For some time the DailyTelegraph has been publishing the wonderful, strange signs that people see when the travel. In a similar vein, I have two signs which caught my eye on my recent trip to Richmond, Virginia in the US.

Forget for a minute that Wales actually lost in the semi-final against France yesterday. In another way they have won given the coverage they have received over the last month or so and in the after match reports.
How?

Walking in London’s west end last night, I couldn’t help but notice that Christmas lights and decorations have already been installed!

British Airways is planning to offer a new perk for its frequent flyers: a course on how to survive a plane crash.

British beer lovers should head north. The weather may be grim up north, but the cheap beer will cheer you no end.

Since the last general election, issues about tourism have come up more than I seem to remember in the past. A typical debate was one covering Yorkshire that happened last month.

Egypt may have hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons this year (the clashes in Cairo earlier this week killed 25 people and injured more than 300), but the Egyptian pyramids remain the sight most people want to see before they die.

I happened to see the Sarah Jessica Parker film, I Don’t Know How She Does It, last night. The film, based on Alison Pearson’s best selling novel, was shot in Boston and had the effect of making me want to book a break in Boston.

The UK has been gripped by festival fever. Last month we celebrated cheese week and cruise week (one event that we could, pardon the pun, get onboard with).

The announcement that the National trust had reached four million members was the cause for much comment on TV and the newspapers. Most of that was based on wondering whether the organisation was still full of crusty do-gooders or whether its modern approach to allowing people to touch things was a bit too “popular” and trendy.