While in Cape Town, I had the good fortune of attending the currently featured exhibit at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Africa Art, and was blown away. It was something the Cape Town wind had almost accomplished on its own, but the museum finished the job.

My experience last week with a failed trip to South Africa on United Airlines convinced me that South Africa needs its national carrier and should find a way to maintain it no matter what the cost. There’s no way to put a number value on what that airline brought to the country.

I was booked on a United Airlines flight from Newark at 9:15 p.m. that was supposed to land in Johannesburg at 5:45 p.m. the next day, after 14 hours and 40 minutes in the air. Many people won’t take a flight that long, and for good reason. Sitting in an airplane for 15 hours is not many people’s idea of fun. It can be fun, but it has to be tiring. It was particularly trying last Thursday, and the flight never left the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

Browsing through the headlines on Saturday morning, I saw that a woman in Phoenix attacked a TSA employee for taking her apple juice. Elsewhere that day, a brawl broke out on a flight from Australia, leading to a forced landing, and four passengers arrested. That’s just from a quick browse through the top headlines on Saturday, a random day. It seems like it’s a pretty common thing now to hear about disruptions, fights, brawls, temper tantrums breaking out on planes and at tourist sites and all over. Because some aspects of travel do put pressure on people, a certain amount of that stress erupts on flights, in airports, and so forth. Read the rest of this entry »

“The wind is in from Africa, last night I couldn’t sleep.”

–from Carey by Joni Mitchell

It’s almost time for Indaba. South Africa’s Travel Indaba will take place this year May 9-11 at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Convention Centre in Durban, South Africa. The return of Indaba every May reminds me of all the reasons I love South Africa and am constantly trying to get my American friends to go there and experience it. Read the rest of this entry »

I keep getting this image of a world that has changed radically, but we have come out of hibernation with the pictures in our minds of the world we knew pre-hibernation. We are victims of the Rip Van Winkle syndrome, waking up in a world that is drastically changed from what you remember. Now, in 2023, many of the ravages of Covid are sinking into the past as fading memories. But if we are expecting the world to be as it was before the nightmare, we are likely to get hit with some reality adjustors.

It appears that Israelis are just not having Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to restructure the country’s judiciary. Demonstrations, that have been ongoing since Netanyahu announced his plans in January, were ratcheted up to a much hotter level last Sunday after he fired his defense minister. The minister had urged Netanyahu to ease up on his push to defang the judiciary because it was leading to dissension among the military. That created a “clear, immediate and tangible threat to the security of the nation.” The news stories might have raised the concerns of anyone thinking of traveling to Israel.

Avanti Destinations named Tenerife as a new destination on its roster of places where it provides components for independent vacation packages. It’s the first new destination Avanti has added for a while. Adding destinations was not a big trend during the Covid lockdown, or even now while the industry is re-tooling and getting back on its feet. Avanti’s last introduction of a major destination was Abu Dhabi in June 2022.

Life At Sea Cruises, a spin-off of the 30-year old Miray Cruises, introduced a three-year cruise around the world for $30,000 a year. The ship for the voyage will be the MV Gemini, with 400 cabins and a capacity of 1,074 passengers. It will depart Nov. 1 from Istanbul and travel 130,000 miles, visiting 375 ports in 135 countries on seven continents. The stops include 103 tropical islands. More than 200 of the port stops will be overnight stays. The company is now taking bookings.

I spoke last week to Jennifer Tombaugh, president of Tauck, the global tour and cruise operator. She’d just returned from Morocco, where she was attending the company’s annual tour directors meeting. That’s where Tauck pulls together its directors of tours, river cruises, and small-ship ocean voyages around the world. If you’ve ever experienced the gentle dynamism of a tour director in action, you can well imagine the sparks that were flying through the atmosphere in that exotic setting where Tauck had brought together hundreds of them for a conference.

TourRadar, a company that aggregates 2,500 international adventure operators offering 50,000 tour products on a single booking platform, has made its network of operators commissionable to the retail travel community. The company is offering 12 percent commission till June 30 as part of its efforts to invite potential travel advisor partners to its network.

For me, it took some longevity to learn to really appreciate geology. When I was in school, geology textbooks were pretty dull-looking. Someone gave me a rock collection with rocks glued to a posterboard, each one identified with the name of the type of rock: granite, pyrite, or sandstone. One of them was an amethyst, a purple gemstone, rough and uncut, as it looked when it was dug from the earth, shaped like a tiny crystalline rocket. I found them fascinating but that was about the extent of my appreciation of geology at that time.

When I am asked “What’s your favorite trip of all you’ve ever taken?” I am dumbfounded. But one that floats quickly to the surface of my mind, as one of the best trips ever, was a cruise on the Amazon River.

I had always wanted to see the jungle. From watching movies as a kid, I had thought of the jungle as being in Africa. When I went on safari to see the Great Migration in East Africa, the environment I found myself in was not a jungle at all. It was the high plains, the African savanna, which means “treeless plains.”

Last week I spoke to Carol Dimopoulos, the founder and CEO of Learning Journeys, about the term “regenerative travel.” There’s another term she prefers when speaking about the Learning Journeys style of delivering service. She calls it “restorative travel.”

Learning Journeys offers “Journeys of Transformation,” educational experiences that take place while traveling to special destinations. The programs are based on specific interests, such as photography, wildlife, arts and crafts, dance, music or gastronomy, and include encounters with various kinds of experts and teachers.

Attention travel advisors! The latest threat of extinction is from artificial intelligence: AI chatbots are now predicted to take the place of travel advisors. This buzz was raised to a roar last Nov. 30, when OpenAI released to the public its ChatGPT, a technology that can carry on chats that seem uncannily human, and can answer questions on a wide range of subjects. OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public as part of its research and data collection, sort of crowd-sourcing its research and development.

There’s a new catchphrase going around now: Regenerative Travel. The New York Times baptized the new phrase last August, in a story called: Move Over, Sustainable Travel. Regenerative Travel Has Arrived.

The subhead asks the question: “Can a post-vaccine return to travel be smarter and greener than it was before March 2020?”

Croatia has been approved to join the Schengen area, becoming the 27th country to become part of the world’s largest free-travel area. The decision was finalized at a Dec. 8 meeting of the Ministers of Internal Affairs and Justice of the EU member states. The change will take place officially on Jan. 1, 2023.

The tour operators I’ve spoken to about this tell me the change is not expected to have much impact immediately, or directly, on American travelers. The US and Canada are already visa-free nations for entry into Croatia. But there are some good possibilities for positive long-term effects.

At the USTOA Annual Conference and Marketplace in Austin in late November, I had the good fortune of running into Scott Nisbet, the CEO of the Globus Family of Brands.

As head of one of the most global of all tour operators, Scott Nisbet is a good person to talk to for reading what is happening in the global travel industry. The Globus Family of brands includes Globus escorted tours, Cosmos budget priced tours, Monograms independent tour packages, and Avalon Waterways river cruises. It’s about as broad a selection of travel products as is offered by any company anywhere. Based in Lugano, Switzerland, the company’s reach spreads around the world and touches every aspect of the travel business that is part of a tour, and that’s practically everything. The company offers programs on six continents and sixty-five countries.

One of the reasons many attendees consider the USTOA Annual Conference & Marketplace the best travel conference of the year is because the tour operator members send their top people to the conference. It creates opportunities for unparalleled access to the heaviest movers and shakers of the tour industry. Because the tour segment connects and aggregates the products of all the other segments of the travel industry, the USTOA conference is a central connecting point for the entire global travel industry.

Perillo Tours, the company that has been known as “synonymous with Italy” for three generations of family ownership, is debuting a new tour program for Greece for 2023, and Steve Perillo, the company president, says the tour is flying off the shelf.

“This was not the big year,” he told me. “Next year is the big year. We’re seeing a gigantic wave. We’re about half sold out. Usually, you start selling in January. Prices are up, and nobody cares.”

The Election is over. Hallelujah!

Election years are well known to be bad for markets, because they introduce an element of uncertainty, and markets don’t like uncertainty.

The midterm of a president’s first term is particularly troublesome. According to Jeff Sommer, in the New York Times, “Numbers going back more than a century show that the second year has generally been the weakest for the stock market in a president’s term.”

Though the world has taken on appearances that closely resemble the pre-Covid world, I am often reminded by events that the world has changed a lot more during the Covid period than we yet realize. It will take some time to sort out the changes, and the effects both good and bad. On the good side, travel is back. But like everything else, it’s changed.

The constraints imposed by Covid accelerated many trends: the trend toward remote working and meetings, toward more concern by consumers about sustainability, and toward making airports safer from disease. Many other trends were also accelerated.