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 »

In all the years I have been writing about tour operators John Stachnik was one of the greatest of them all. He was a sterling character in every way. He was one of the smartest, most capable, most amiable, kind-hearted and good-humored men I ever had the good fortune of meeting.

He died July 17 at his home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 82 years old, though it’s hard to believe. He was an eternally youthful person. He always looked young, like a kid. But more than looks, it was a spark in his eye, a spring in his step and a smile perpetually turning up the corners of his mouth.

I had the pleasure of meeting with him often over the years, because he was always so active in the industry. He was a major presence for 40 years. Read the rest of this entry »

The company known as Chinatour since its founding in 2002 by Alex Wang in San Francisco, has joined the U.S. Tour Operators Association, rebranded as Elite Voyages, and expanded its product range beyond Asia, its previous area of operation. In addition to Asia, it now offers Europe, South America and North Africa. This is a vast set of changes for a company formerly known as Chinatour.

The company first used the name Elite Voyages in 2019 for luxury-tier bespoke programs. It also offers pre-set itineraries. When joining USTOA this year, the company put the Elite Voyages brand up front as the main brand for the company going forward. Read the rest of this entry »

The Eastern Cape province of South Africa is an up-and-coming area for safaris. While Kruger National Park, in the eastern part of the country, was set aside to protect wildlife in 1898, the development of the Eastern Cape as a safari area has only been taking hold in the last few decades. The area had previously been made into farmland by farmers who drove out the big predators that would have feasted on their livestock if given a chance.

In recent times, history has gone into reverse there, back toward what it was before being settled by farmers in the early 1800s. Bit by bit, conservationists have been buying up farmland and “rewilding” it, restoring it to what was its natural condition from time immemorial until the farmers drove out the wildlife. Read the rest of this entry »

It started out much like other safaris. We piled into an open 4X4 safari vehicle with four rows of tiered seats and headed out into the bush. A few moments into the drive we encountered a wildebeest. We stopped and looked, as it looked back at us. Then we moved on.

Our guide, who was driving, told us, “It’s hard to compete with the Big Five.” There are no lions on the 47,000-hectare reserve known as the Cradle of Humankind. Only a 45-minute drive from Johannesburg, it’s not surprising that some of the larger, more charismatic wildlife have moved farther into the wilderness. There are leopards and waterbucks, and many other kinds of fascinating animals and plants, but this is not about the Big Five. What it has is something no one else in the world has: the oldest hominid fossils so far discovered on Earth Read the rest of this entry »

It should come as no surprise that Gina Bang is having some serious impact on Avanti Destinations. It’s as if her name was a literal description of her effect on the Portland, Oregon-based travel wholesaler.

Since she was promoted last January to chief sales and marketing officer, she has expanded, restructured and reignited Avanti’s sales team. She’s been cleaning out the cobwebs of the system and making things run more smoothly.

Ms. Bang has been with Avanti for 21 years. She’s worked all over the company and knows how things work. She has great people skills and has been inspiring the team, which then inspires its respective travel advisor customers in each sales region Read the rest of this entry »

Next year, 2025, will be the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Tauck, and at this major milestone the tour operator is taking a serious look at its concept of group touring. Historically, the Tauck tour might have carried as many as 40 in a group. That was more or less the capacity of the standard touring motorcoach Read the rest of this entry »

When I was in South Africa in May, I had the rare pleasure of visiting the Oyster Box hotel in Umhlanga Village, a few minutes’ drive north from the city of Durban. I say “rare” because most Americans who do visit South Africa don’t make it to KwaZulu-Natal province on the east coast, and they miss one of the best places in the country Read the rest of this entry »