Ninety years is a long, long time. Tour operators often proudly promote the fact that they have been in business for 20 years, and rightly so. That’s impressive. Keeping a tour operator in business through all the wars, stock market crashes, natural disasters and recessions of the last 20 years is a major accomplishment. Such events have taken down many along the way.

International tour operation is a business that is affected by every economic tremor and major event in the world. It’s not for anyone who wants to make an easy buck Read the rest of this entry »

There’s something very appealing about the archetypal family business. Croatia’s Katarina Line is a real family business, with a bio that is an inspiring success story.

The mom, Katica Hauptfeld, is the founder and chief. The son Daniel is director of marketing. The daughter Anamaria is director of the cruise division. Daniel’s wife helps with marketing and Anamaria’s husband helps with other projects. And, as with any family business, they all pitch in together to do whatever is required to propel the business. Read the rest of this entry »

Avanti Destinations, the Portland-based provider of independent, custom-designed vacation packages, is expanding to the South Pacific, a new region for the company.

Avanti’s South Pacific product line will debut with eight recommended vacation package templates, which are offered as recommended default programs that can be used as offered, or can be altered by clients in practically any way that does not defy the laws of physics. Australia can’t be moved closer to Los Angeles, for example. However, most requested changes within the scope of reality can be accommodated.

Avanti’s range of vacation components include 222 three- to five-star hotels in 50-some locations in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji and 280 tours or activities. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, recently said: “I know there’s a lot of hype here, and in some individual cases it is overblown, but anybody who tells you that AI is pure hype, that person is only fooling herself.”

That seems to be a reasonable middle ground somewhere between utopia and oblivion. It’s a safe generalization. It would be absurd to write off all of AI because ChatGPT doesn’t quite live up to some of the predictions.

It does seem that for this particular wave of AI, the language models, the magic carpet is descending toward Earth a bit. People are beginning to understand it better: what it is capable of, how to use it, what to beware of, and its limitations. Read the rest of this entry »

Carol Dimopoulos, the colorful CEO of Learning Journeys, recently returned from India. It was the latest of a dozen previous trips to India, but only the second to southern India. She came back super jazzed.

“They were happy to see foreign guests,” she said. “They believe the guest is God, you know. That’s their motto.”

Carol’s group in India received even more attention than they might have otherwise because foreign travelers are still somewhat rare in post-lockdown Southern India.

For the average traveler who just wants to take a two-week vacation sometime during the year, there are all sorts of messes she can stumble into. We are now in a world of constant change, and to travel well requires the guidance of a full-time professional—one that can keep on top of the changes as they affect travel and inform clients about the many things that could ruin their vacations. Read the rest of this entry »

A standard dodge for politicians who are asked to account for some comment is that the statement was “quoted out of context.” In most cases, it’s just a way to avoid being held accountable for one’s statements, but sometimes it’s a valid complaint. A recent article on travel was a masterpiece of out-of-context quoting.

Most people who see this article have probably seen an article in the New Yorker called “The Case Against Travel” by Agnes Callard. Such a provocative title was sure to capture the attention of Read the rest of this entry »

Few events have generated as much hype and controversy as the introduction of ChatGPT last October. When its developer, Open AI, provided open access to the generative AI program, the site set a record for the fastest growing user base in history. It grew to 100 million users in two months. At the same time, it generated a tsunami of wild speculation and panic.

It would be bad enough that artificial intelligence is predicted by some to take over the jobs of travel professionals and virtually everyone else. But since the arrival of ChatGPT, many of the pioneer developers of artificial intelligence have issued ominous warnings that AI may lead to Read the rest of this entry »

Celestyal Cruises has a long pedigree. Its parent company, Louis PLC, was the first travel agency in Cyprus in 1935. The vintage operator of Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean cruises is now embarked on a major relaunch of the brand and the product.

In March Celestyal introduced a new ship, the Journey, which represents the new course it is charting for its redefined future. In September the Journey will replace the Crystal, which will be retired.

Read the rest of this entry »

At Africa’s Travel Indaba, the trade show held in Durban May 9-11, South African Tourism presented a seminar called USA Market Access Workshop. It was targeted at African tourism businesses looking for insights on how to penetrate the vast North American travel market. But the market intelligence presented could be equally valuable to American travel advisors looking for insights on how to tap into the potential American market for travel to Africa. Read the rest of this entry »

I would love to be a fly on the wall at a corporate board meeting of United Airlines when they are discussing redesigning the floor plan of their planes. I imagine there has to be a lot of number crunching. United thinks in terms of big numbers. It’s the world’s third largest airline, after American and Delta. It operates 4,500 flights per day. Roughly speaking, that’s something like 1.6 million flights a year. Those aren’t all 747s, but just for the sake of very rough approximate calculations, let’s use those numbers. With 1.6 million flights, we can approximate and still get some idea of the mass of the operation. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.