Those of us brought up on Fawlty Towers might find it hard to believe that a Torquay hotel has been named as best for service in the UK and that it has also been listed in the top 25 hotels in the world. Obviously there are no Basil’s, Manuel’s or Sybil’s at the Charterhouse Hotel which has won this accolade.
This award is for service, the most important feature of what we buy after the product itself. Even then you can cope with a product that is not perfect if the service is special. I have stayed in hotels that were not the best. The service, the attention and the fact that nothing seems too much trouble has made ordinary hotels into splendid ones. In those I have stayed in again and again. And recommended

New Year’s Eve and the first day of the New Year have become tourist attractions in their own right. Television has magnified it by capturing the moment when the New Year begins in a number of places. Around lunchtime on New Years Eve, the new year is heralded in Sydney in Australia with a huge firework display and winds down about 24 hours later with the display from Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In between, there is the traditional gathering in London at Trafalgar Square, in Princes Street in Edinburgh, the swinging of fireballs in Stonehaven near Aberdeen (quite a sight if you’ve never seen it) and the counting in of the new year in Times Square in New York. As well as that a large number of towns and cities such as Nottingham and Carlisle will have firework displays.

Over the weekend over 40 events really saw the end of Scotland’s Homecoming Year. As you will remember this was a year long celebration of things Scottish and a determined effort to draw people back to their roots. It was almost an attempt to woo people back much as the Irish have successfully done. The timing, though this couldn’t have been planned, gave Scotland a strong tourism appeal whilst other countries laboured to attract visitors. With St Andrew’s Day today heralding the official end, it is probably too early to say how successful it was although that hasn’t stopped people from hailing it as a runaway success.

Madness have been singing about London for 30 years and now the group’s frontman, Suggs, has written a book about his top spots in the English capital. CD Traveller thought it was about time we shared a few of our own favourites…

Summer was – for the third year running – something of wash out. On the plus side, the Met office are predicting that the rain will not only stay away throughout September, but that the monsoon like weather will give way to a dry and – dare we say it – hot spell. CD Traveller tells you how to keep your cool in the capital

I’ve always thought that Summer ends as you eat the last blackberries on the bushes and listen to the Last Night of the Proms. A few years ago, London devised another way to end Summer and it coincides with the Heritage Open days this weekend.

Just capital
London comes alive in the summer; there is so much to see and do. However if you’re lacking the imagination to find something to keep you entertained, fret no longer. The CD Traveller team has come up with some suggestions to see you through the summer months…
Get into shape
Wheely great
We all love the feel [...]

Rollonfriday is a law gossip website passing titbits on about what is happening in law practices around Britain. So I was not expecting to find them running a column on tips for tourists visiting our countries and, in particular, London.About 30 years ago, the “New Statesman” had a competition about the same thing and some [...]

Walk across Westminster Bridge in London and at some stage you will be barred by a tourist taking a picture of the tall building that houses Big Ben, the bell that everyone hears at some stage in their lives. .Be it on HP sauce bottles, the opening credits of the old London Films, BBC news [...]

It seems to me that, this year, there are more adverts on the tube in London than ever before for holidays. Not only on the tube trains themselves but on the posters on the stations and by the escalators.I was up in London to go and see the musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. (well [...]