There’s a shift taking place in the travel industry, categories are being redefined as traveler preferences evolve. Rental Escapes, one of the up-and-coming villa rental companies, is not a hotel company or a tour operator but covers the functions of both.

Historically hotels and tour operators have been separate businesses offering different but complementary services. Now we are seeing robust growth in villa rentals, and some villa rental companies are developing the business of destination management.

Villa rentals are nowhere near taking the place of hotels, but they are providing an alternative, and for many the alternative is preferable to Airbnb.

Now in its 92nd year of operations, SITA World Tours is an old-timer. But the travel industry is far too dynamic and ever-changing to allow any company to get set in its ways. No tour operator survives nine decades without being highly alert and adaptable. SITA must be vibrant and agile to keep on top of constantly changing times. It combines its use of new technologies with some practices that haven’t essentially changed since the company started in 1933.

Primitive? Old fashioned? Perhaps. Probably the most important of SITA’s surviving early practices is intensive human interaction between the company and its travel agent partners.

This is a multi-million company, handling travel in 90 countries on six continents, in business for more than 90 years. That it has state of the art technology pretty much goes without saying for Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has seen any footage of the recent fires in Southern California has to have been terrified. It looked as though Los Angeles, long seen by the world as a heavenly place, had been turned into a flaming inferno. The spreading, engulfing flames carried by high winds were beyond any human efforts to resist. It defied belief and still does. The situation is literally beyond comprehension.

California has suffered one of the worst disasters ever seen. The destruction is almost impossible to calculate. However, most of Southern California is still intact and escaped any damage from the fires. Californians need support more than ever.

According to the State of California nearly 58,000 acres have burned during the recent wave of fires, which is not even finished yet. More than 16,000 buildings have been destroyed. Miraculously, only 29 fatalities were recorded from the catastrophe Read the rest of this entry »

With the astonishing advances in AI in the last three years, it might be a good time to reassess the importance of the human touch in customer service. I am amazed at what the latest wave of generative AI can do, on top of the tremendous advances we’ve been living with for a while already. A new horizon is coming into view of infinite ways to apply these new technologies. People are discovering ways to combine them with other technologies that already exist or are now being developed. We are only at the beginning of learning what works and what doesn’t. Nearly any repetitive task can be automated. But some customer relations functions are better performed by people. Read the rest of this entry »

Founded in 1970, Goway Travel is now in its 55^th year.

Whatever else was happening in the world between 1970 and today, Bruce Hodge was building a travel company. He was a young Australian trained as an economist, but that interest was overridden by a passion for travel. He moved from Australia to Canada and settled in Toronto. After working briefly as a tour guide in England he got the inspiration to start his own tour operation.

He started it as a one-man operation working out of his Toronto apartment. He worked in a peanut butter factory to support the company as it was getting off the ground.

Panama is a tiny country everyone knows a little about, but most of us don’t know very much about. We all know about the Panama Canal, which revolutionized world transportation and shipping when it was completed by the United States in 1914 after 10 years of construction, following a failed attempt by the French to do the same thing.

The importance of the canal cannot be overstated. It saves about 8,000 nautical miles in making the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

What else can you tell me about Panama? It is the country that Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty years ago there was concern in the travel industry that not enough young people were becoming travel retailers. If trends were to continue, as the older generation retired it might leave the field with a shortage of competent retailers.

That wasn’t long after another fear had gripped the industry, the fear that new technologies and airline disintermediation would render the whole profession of travel retailer obsolete. Read the rest of this entry »

As the 10:45 a.m. opening session of the USTOA Annual Conference and Marketplace approached, several hundred attendees converged in an auditorium at the JW Marriott Marco Island Beach Resort, and a tentative hum grew into a roar. As people strolled in and the crowd grew in size, a palpable energy built until it became like a wild force of nature, crackling in the atmosphere. By the time Terry Dale, the CEO of the U.S. Tour Operators Association, hopped onto the stage to open the ceremonies, it was already clear why this event was one of the most exciting places to be in the travel industry and in the world at large. Read the rest of this entry »

AAT Kings, the century-old operator of tours down under, has made some important upgrades in the ways it conducts business with travel retailers, making it easier to access their tours, information, training, and special offers.

The enhancements of AAT Kings’ business practices are designed to make it easier for travel advisors to work with the company and to easily and efficiently get what they need for their clients seeking to travel in Australia and New Zealand. That’s AAT Kings’ home territory and its only area of operations. Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday, Dec. 5, wholesaler Avanti Destinations, will conduct a webinar introducing the new travel possibilities opened by Fiji Airways’ upcoming nonstop flights from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) to Nadi, Fiji Airways will launch its new flights Dec. 10.

In preparation for the launch of the new flights, Avanti Destinations and Fiji Airways have teamed up for a campaign aimed at educating travel advisors on new independent travel options to Fiji. The campaign offers travel professionals a comprehensive look at a broad range of available options for assembling custom vacation packages and tours to Fiji. Avanti introduced its Fiji options in 2023, as part of a launch of a larger expansion into the South Pacific.

The Freddie Mercury Tour in Montreux, Switzerland, was one of those things that at first impression seems displaced. While traveling I am constantly encountering things that seem out of place. Everything is everywhere now. I bought a scarf in Switzerland. For me, it’s a souvenir from Switzerland because that’s where I bought it. But it’s not really Swiss, except that it’s warm wool and perfect for wearing around your neck in the mountains. It’s a Scottish tartan plaid. And it was made in China.

The Tauck Rhine River Connoisseur river cruise that I recently joined included an optional (but included) tour of the Charlie Chaplin home and museum in Vevey, Switzerland, between Montreux and Lausanne, where Chaplin lived during the last period of his life. It’s called Chaplin’s World. Visiting the home and museum was an amazing experience. It revealed to me much more of the genius of that great early film innovator than I had known before.

The museum itself, apart from its subject, was an amazing achievement. Known as The Studio, it was a huge structure, like a large warehouse, packed with fascinating, room-sized displays showing various aspects of Chaplin’s life and career. Many of them included full-sized mannequins, or perhaps they should be called full-color sculptures of some of the main figures of Chaplin’s life

It’s hard to write a news column, even one specifically about travel news, without acknowledging last week’s Big Event. It greatly overshadows most other events, and to ignore it would be to have a very large elephant in the room.

I don’t, however, want to rehash any political issues and I don’t think many others do either at the moment. The presidential election is over. The tension that builds towards that major turning point every four years is dispersed. We have a brief reprieve from the political battles that have gripped the nation all year. We can take a breath, get some good RnR, and get ready for whatever comes next. One matter in which there may be some consensus in this proverbially divided nation is that it’s a relief that that’s over Read the rest of this entry »

The partnership between Tauck and Ken Burns has produced a new tour called “Music of America” that focuses on the history of American music, with visits to Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans and Mississippi.

As with all the programs in this series since the beginning of the partnership 15 years ago, the itineraries are put together by a team that includes Tauck product development experts working with filmmaker Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, the historian and writer who has been a close partner to Burns on the creation of many of his most successful films. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 2025 travel season CroisiEurope, the France-based river cruise operator, is offering some new destinations and itineraries, as well as some exclusive departures for the U.S. market. The company is introducing new cruise itineraries in Belgium, the Netherlands and India.

These three new entries are added to CroisiEurope’s roster of some 170 itineraries on 50 ships in 37 countries, stretching across Europe, the Mediterranean, Northern and Southern Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Read the rest of this entry »

Avanti Destinations, founded in 1981 and one of the first wholesalers to offer travel retailers the capacity to custom-build their own packages online, has introduced a new series of pre-formed packages it calls “fixed price” packages. Avanti is offering 58 of the non-customizable packages for travel in 18 countries in Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific.

It’s the opposite of Avanti’s original model of offering easily-assembled packages built to order. But it is complementary to it, and it fills out the wholesaler’s service profile nicely.

The fixed price packages are available for Read the rest of this entry »

Central Holidays is adding a series of new experiences to its classic tours of Italy. It’s updating its long-running tours with a series of new, immersive activities designed to take its clients beyond the feeling of being a tourist and give them a deeper connection with the local culture and way of life.

Central Holidays has been in business since 1972, offering independent packages and escorted tours to a wide range of destinations in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. But it all started in Italy. The founders, Fred and Joe Berardo, were born in Italy and migrated to America.

For 2025, AmaWaterways is making a leap into South America, launching a pair of cruise itineraries on the Magdalena River in Colombia. It’s breaking into a new continent for the company, and it’s the first major river cruise operator to offer cruises on the Magdalena River on the Caribbean side, with two seven-night voyages between Cartagena and Barranquilla.

AmaWaterways co-founder and executive vice president Kristin Karst told me, “It’s one of our most exciting ventures yet.” She assured me that the company intends to keep “pushing the boundaries.”

The company is seriously on the move. AmaWaterways is currently operating 26 ships in Europe and Asia. It will be adding several new ships over the next two years Read the rest of this entry »

Why were 50,000 Maasai people gathering in protest in the Ngorongoro area of Tanzania in the last week of August? Trying to answer that question is like peeling back an onion of many layers. It brings together many knotty elements of the complex and rapidly changing world of 21st-century tourism.

On August 21 Chadema, a major political party in Tanzania, posted on Facebook images of a massive demonstration that carried on for days in the area of the Ngorongoro Crater.

The pictures showed what looked like a sea of indigenous Maasai people, painting the African landscape red with their traditional red robes. The post claimed that 50,000 people had gathered Read the rest of this entry »

It’s August, the peak of the traditional summer vacation season, and Santa wants to know: Have you taken your vacation time?

If not, you’re typical for an American, but not typical in a way you want to be. Let others live boring lives. You don’t have to.

Earlier in the summer, Expedia came out with its 24^th Annual Vacation Deprivation Report. It said, “Roughly half of Americans don’t plan on using all their time off this year (53%), despite receiving just 12 days off annually — the fewest of any country surveyed.” Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk about American Cruise Lines. There are so many things I want to share about this company I barely know where to begin.

Briefly, it is an American operator of cruises on great rivers across the country, and on coastal waters. The coastal cruises hug the coastline, never out of sight of land. They are operated essentially like river cruises.

There’s much more to get back to about this company, but first, a quick look at the headlines:

On August 15, the company will have two big events, spread across the USA. Read the rest of this entry »