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 [...]

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.

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.

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.

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.

A man few tourists will have heard of has died this week

His name may be unfamiliar but his achievements will be known. In York he was the driving force behind turning the excavations on the remains found into what became the Jorvik Centre. After that the company he set up, Heritage Projects, which used the skills of those people from the York work was used to promote other tourism work.

Given the weather that we are having this week (and last come to think of it) you may not be thinking of lounging in the sun but Thomas Cook is.Their German company has decided, as you may have seen, to allow German bookers to prebook for €3 a day, sun lounges if they do it [...]

No this isn’t another moan about the quality or even quantity of customer service that Ryanair offers. Well not really. No this is a comment on what Ryanair thinks it does.You might have seen in yesterday’s media stories about how Ryanair has made €136.5 million profit (about £119 million) in the first 3 months of [...]

In the last few days a number of countries have issued numbers on how tourism is performing. All four, Greece, Indonesia, Thailand and the United States have all shown a declineIn Greece tourism spending has dropped by nearly 18% for the first five months of the year compared to last year but in May alone [...]

All the schools have broken up now. My local rail carpark is only about half full and the 7.30am traffic jam no longer exists. That means that some of you have already started your holidays.So are you holidaying in this country, having a staycation or are you going abroad after all? We are going to [...]

In North America they seem to have got couponing down to a fine art. Over here, it almost seems in its infancy in comparison. Nonetheless, you can find discount offers to attractions on various giveaway maps and brochures from tourist offices, in tourism magazines and, sometimes, from airlines, train companies’ magazines, newspapers and general magazines.You [...]

Someone spotted that Ryanair charged the same price in euros as it did in pounds. This idea comes courtesy of 360travelguide.com which was picked up by the online trade magazine, Travolution.Because Ryanair say that a euro equals a pound, they were making an extra 16% clear profit over and above their usual profit if [...]

Why do you go on holiday?To relax, see new places, unwind, do something you’ve not done before, shop, ski, cross the Amazon by frog as Michael Palin did in Ripping Yarns twenty years ago.Well according to research from the holiday side of Jet2, a third of over 45′s bond with their adult children! Does this [...]

We have some new German research that says in another 10 years time, haif of all tourists from Germny will be over 50. And, you’re not going to believe this bit either, but this same research says that people over 50 spend more money on holidays than those under 50.Of course we do, we have [...]