Is cruise a sustainable way of spending your holiday? Joining 3 or almost 4,000 others on a slab-sided vessel which resembles a floating council estate. True, the on-board delights are many with all sorts of food and entertainment thrown in, but what about the devastation caused when 3, 4 or more of these behemoths turn up at the same place at the same time? Here is an article about Santorini: "According to official data from the Greek Port Association, Santorini received 783,893 cruise visitors in 2016. Bank of Greece figures, meanwhile, show that the contribution of cruise tourism to the economy that same year came to 509 million euros, with Piraeus benefiting at a rate of 43.8 percent, Co
Amongst my emails this morning came a missive from British Airways: " ... the personal and financial details of customers making or changing bookings at ba.com, and on our app were compromised" Why BA feel the need to use the Oxford comma incorrectly, I know not. Though a bit of a bug-bear of mine, that is not the reason for this piece. Unless of course, they had slipped a split infinitive or two in there, just for fun. Getting back to the matter in hand, the email was addressed to "Dear Customer" not to myself on a personal level; from this, we may deduce that the email is a round robin, rather than a message alerting specific people to specific events. Lastly, the email places the burden
It is always interesting to watch the advance of technology. Or, at least, what many involved in travel tech see as "advances". Many are not "advances" at all, simply taking an old idea and giving it a brush down and spending a few squillion on advertising to make something look like a great advance. "Self Connect" is a good example. What boils down to joining up two flights that you cannot join up, giving the booking a fancy name and then putting in the small print: "if you cannot make the connection, it is not our problem". But I digress. The thing that is missing (in the mandating of travel tech) is a sense of balance. To what extent do you allow tech to take over and remove human contact
Having recently been lambasted for calling travel bloggers "warts on the backside of the travel industry", it may be wise to take a few moments to clarify this rather (admittedly) wild statement. Let me be clear, I have no time at all for those travel bloggers, who, because they have x amount of followers on whatever social media platform, think they have a god-given right to free holidays and plague operators and airlines with constant requests for freebies, on the promise of a write-up. When these parasites are given a freebie, then that money has to come from somewhere and it is invariably out of the same pocket that funds front-line travel agent educationals. Educationals are vitally imp
