More passengers chose to take off from Gatwick rather than its bigger London rival, Heathrow, throughout November. Gatwick reported that it saw an extra 12,800 fliers last month – representing a rise of 0.6 percent.

CD-Traveller tells you what’s hot and what’s not in the travel world. This month, it’s good news for Glasgow and Gothenburg and gourmands in London, but we’ve lost trust in TripAdvisor…

Last week, The Mersey Partnership tourism awards were announced. Tate Liverpool and its Picasso exhibition last year walked away with two of the main awards, the Tourism Marketing Initiative of the Year and the Cultural and Heritage Experience of the Year.

Liverpool,
Carnival day is the 16th July

Escaping to sunnier shores with the kids this half term but wondering which airport to fly out from? Make up your mind with our handy guide

It doesn’t seem that it has been 25 years since the Greek actress, Melina Mercouri, and the French culture minister of the time, Jack Lang jointly conceived of the idea of having, each year, a European Capital of Culture. Starting tomorrow, the European Union will be celebrating the idea with a conference in Brussels to consider the achievements and what might be done in the future.
This year there are three capitals of culture per year, Essen in Germany, Istanbul in Turkey and Pecs in Hungary. The idea has been copied in the Middle East, where Alexandria in Egypt is this year’s beneficiary, and the Americas where this year Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic is the winner. As British Tourism Week has ended what next to celebrate tourism? Margaret Hodge our minister for culture, has announced that we will have our own British capital of culture from 2013.

The hotel chain, Jurys, has polled 4,000 Britons to see what they thought were the most unwelcoming cities in the UK. It will probably come as no surprise to you that London was considered to have the worst customer service. People also thought that the locals were ruder than other places. A third regularly didn’t say thank you and over half failed to smile at passers-by. Jurys concluded that this didn’t augur well for us when tourists visit us en masse for the Olympics in 2012.
Is all this a fair accusation at London or indeed, the next most unwelcoming cities of Glasgow, Bradford, Birmingham or Liverpool

The phrase above is the slogan that Visit Britain us using as part of its advertising campaign to encourage Americans to come and see us. The slogan thought up by Californian, Jay Masunaga, in a competition designed to publicise Britain as a holiday destination for the gay community.
To complement the promotion, Visit Britain has also come up with categories of people to whom Britain would appeal. These are Foodies, Night Owls, Event-Goers, Culturati, Chillers and Fashionistas. You can guess what most of these are but how about Chillers

As the summer ends we are beginning to get a better picture of where we actually went and what we did this summer past.

Both Hoseasons and Park resorts who largely operate holidays in Britain, have announced that they did bumper business this year as did the caravanning industry. Some sites were full in August.

Following on from yesterday’s blog on the success of Liverpool as one of the 2008Cities of Culture, I thought which city this year.As is now the custom there are two, Vilnius in Lithuania and Linz in Austria. Linz is twinned with Edinburgh but as far as I can see, Vilnius is not twinned with any [...]

As we wrote a year ago, Liverpool was one of two European cities of culture in 2008. the Liverpool Culture Company has just presented it’s report on the effects of the year and reckons that it generated about £800 million for the city and encouraged 3.5million first time visitors. To me this seems a tremendous [...]