As I said yesterday, one of the interesting features of the Visit Britain report is the amount of money that is spent in different places. The figures will be an estimate of course, but they are as good a guide as we are likely to get. And what they show is intriguing. Take London for example. You would expect an overseas visitor to pay more there because it is a more expensive place. Hotels, public transport and restaurant bills will all be more expensive but the difference on how much is spent there compared to elsewhere in our countries is quite wide.

That, according to Visit Britain, is what is attracting people to that part of the country. This is one of many results to be found in a report snappily titled, “Activities Undertaken by Visitors from Overseas in Different Parts of Britain.” But there is a lot on this report to digest, not just the interesting bits that say why visitors go to different regions of our countries. Just as interesting is how much they spend in those regions and the disparities that arise.

[ February 3, 2011 10:00 am to February 6, 2011 5:30 pm. ]
Earl’s Court, London; open till 20.30 on the Thursday.
Adults £10 plus £1.20 booking fee

All the guide books, all the travel articles tell you about the historic part of US cities. And, in fairness, to other world cities as well. What of the other parts? Isn’t there history there as well? They can’t all have been built yesterday. And even if they weren’t, isn’t yesterday history?
It’s one of those little things in tourism that is beginning to annoy me. Why is one part of a place designated a historic district and another isn’t?

Last week CD-Traveller mentioned that this was the time of awards. At the same time as the British Travel Awards, the awards they call the Oscars of travel, the World Travel Awards, were announced. Unlike the British awards, I don’t think the consumer has much say in these.

Two of the “must sees” have just started at the Hayward Gallery , Southbank.
Move: choreographing you
“Move: choreographing you” develops the relationship between artists, movement and dance. Visitors are encouraged to take part by just posing within the installations, or, for the more ambitious: dancing, using hoola hoops, standing on seesaws, throwing [...]

CD Traveller tells you what’s hot and what’s not in the travel world

CD Traveller reader, Jackie Keith, takes us on a tour of her five favourite destinations

Whether you’re staycation-ing or vacationing, CD Traveller tells you what’s happening in the travel world

With the rest of the world to explore, it’s easy to overlook what’s on your doorstep – Blighty! In this, the last in the series, we tell you how to have a capital time in London and reveal the delights of Durham and Bath

When it comes to hip and happening London destinations, Dalston isn’t the most obvious choice. But a trip to the East London suburb proves otherwise; in the build up to the London 2012 Olympic Games and with the extension of the London Overground to Dalston due to open later this month, it’s all happening in E8

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…

Some may find this hard to believe but the Banksy exhibition last year in Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery made it into the top 30 exhibitions visited anywhere in the world.
That isn’t to belittle Bristol but to show what an achievement it was. It was up against capital cities with vastly bigger populations from which to draw visitors. In fact only one other exhibition in the UK drew more visitors, one on Chinese new art which was held at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Greater London’s population is about twenty times more than that of Bristol yet the Chinese exhibition attracted only about 280 more visitors per day than the Banksy one. And because of the nature of Banksy’s work, the exhibition couldn’t be publicised in advance.

CD Traveller unleashes their inner rock star at The Sanctum Soho

According to ABTA, about 2 million of us will leave the country to enjoy Easter abroad. And maybe some decent weather after the returning wintry conditions of this week.
It won’t come as a great surprise to many of you that Spanish resorts are doing well with Tenerife and the Canaries leading the way. You could also guess that Egypt and Turkey are doing well and so they are but Tunisia has also picked up a lot of bookings. Going slightly further afield, Florida is attracting the usual school age groups and booking seem to be up despite the fact that the biggest new attraction, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter doesn’t open until June 18th.
The usual places seem to fill the top spots each year for overseas citybreak destinations. Paris, Amsterdam and Dublin lead the pack with Milan and New York not far behind and this is despite the weakness of the pound against the euro and the dollar.
So who is going away?

I was quite surprised to find yesterday that the first local school had just broken up for Easter. In my mind it was still weeks away but in fact Good Friday is only 2 weeks tomorrow.
After the winter we have had it wouldn’t surprise any of us if bookings to the Spanish resorts and warmer areas was the main appeal but personal finances being what they are, some of us will think of taking no breaks at all. And for those that do go, there could be quite a few handicaps to going away. First there are the railways. The RMT union is considering scheduling a nationwide strike because of what it says are safety issues that may occur when Network Rail lays off staff. . You probably need to be an expert to know if safety was an issue. Needless to say, Network Rail says there is no problem and you have to wonder whether if safety was the issue, the union wouldn’t have called the strike as soon as it legally could. By striking at Easter, the cynical amongst us begin to wonder.

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

It is hard to believe that there has been no new railway route for a century. Yes, the occasional new station has opened but a new route? Chiltern Railways operates lines out of Marylebone in London to the commuter suburbs of north west London and on into Oxfordshire and Birmingham. For the first time they are going to operate a line to Oxford from Marylebone via High Wycombe and Bicester which will take just over the hour.
But, you will say, there are trains already linking Oxford and London using First Great Western out of Paddington via Reading which also take about an hour. What’s different?

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 [...]