Travelrific® Travel Journal
Picture postcards in prose.™ Check out the blogroll on the front page for official merchandise and other resources!Travel Retail Industry Health Report
By Linda Tancs
It’s been reported that $50 billion plus is generated annually from the worldwide travel retail industry. Perhaps staggering growth in the outbound travel market from China and India is fueling the bottom line. Stay tuned….
Share this:
Retail Therapy
By Linda Tancs
“The sky’s the limit” takes on a whole new meaning with inflight shopping. In addition to duty-free purchases, there’s the ubiquitous SkyMall catalog, hawking everything from teddy bears to canopied mini bars for your poolside entertaining. Well, if you’ve got a captive audience you might as well try to captivate them.
Share this:
Airline Customer Service Satisfaction
By Linda Tancs
In this edition of the podcast Travelrific Travel Show, the topic is airline customer service satisfaction–or lack thereof. Why are airline customer service ratings so low? Tune in for the possible causes and weigh in on the solutions. Visit www.travelrificradio.com.
Share this:
Space Tourism
By Linda Tancs
Surveys show that space tourism is very popular. Alas, only those with $20 million or so to spare can actually partake in a trip to the international space station. For the “average” traveler, the closest thing to space travel was probably Concorde. At an altitude of 60,000 miles, you got the same “Star Trek” effect. Double the distance, and you can train for Virgin Galactic. Beam me up, Scotty.
Share this:
New Kid in Town
By Linda Tancs
Pending U.S. Department of Transportation final approval, looks like Virgin will fly on this side of the pond from home base in San Francisco. Foreign airlines seeking fly rights within the U.S. must show that U.S. operations are controlled and majority owned by U.S. citizens. You can read the DOT’s documents in the Virgin case by looking it up at http://dms.dot.gov under docket OST-2005-23307.
Share this:
Luxury Travel
By Linda Tancs
Is there really such a thing as “luxury travel”? Who gets to define what luxury is, anyway? As the old saying goes, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Webster’s dictionary defines luxury as self-indulgence–an enjoyable, but not necessary, thing. But let’s face it, travel is the ultimate indulgence for the mind, body or spirit–whether it be around the block, around the country, or around the world. In that sense, the luxury of any journey, then, depends on how you arrange it in your mind, or as Winston Churchill put it, “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”
Share this:
Virtual Travel
By Linda Tancs
In this week’s edition of the podcast Travelrific, the topic is virtual travel, or, put another way, travel via the internet. At least this is one mode of travel that won’t put a dent in your wallet. And if your fear of travel inhibits your wanderlust, then virtual travel may be the perfect solution. So where in the world would you love to be–right now? Listen in and find out how to get there–virtually, that is. Visit www.travelrificradio.com.
VirtualShare this:
Parlez-vous francais?
By Linda Tancs
Some time ago, there was a lot of ballyhoo about the French ministry banning all English words and colloquialisms from the French vocabulary. Maybe “hamburger” was the last straw. So how do the French react these days to the francophone-challenged tourist? Perhaps not as well as we would like, according to a recent study suggesting that France is perceived negatively on its ability to be welcoming to visitors. Whether this perception is based strictly on unpleasant dealings due to language barriers, however, appears hard to gauge. Anyway, I’ll have some (french) fries with that hamburger.
Share this:
What’s New in the Western Hemisphere?
By Linda Tancs
It should come as no surprise that there’s a run on passports these days. Under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, U.S. citizens traveling via air between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda now need a passport. For the time being at least, the passport is lauded as the best documentation of identity and citizenship. But is it “hassle free”? With the advent of the biometric (data encoded) passport, concerns are rampant that the passport holder’s identifying information is subject to hacking, giving rise to a cottage industry in anti-hacking devices. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes.
Share this:
On The Road Again
By Linda Tancs
A bit of advice for the intrepid international traveler unafraid to take to the open road: make sure the driving permit is legit. An international driving permit (IDP) is only available from two legitimate sources: the American Automobile Association (www.aaa.com) or the American Automobile Touring Alliance (www.nationalautoclub.com).
