Why is tourism to Greece down by as much as 30%? It's not because of a fear of civil disorder, say many observers, but because of a massive decline in visits to Greece by German vacationers, reacting nervously to anti-German sentiment on the part of the Greek population. Germany is widely blamed by the Greeks for the enforced austerity that many of them hate, resulting in less-than-cordial treatment of German tourists, including a recent burning of the German flag in Athens. With hundreds of thousands of German tourists choosing other destinations for their vacations, Greek resorts, restaurants, tours, ships and islands have yawning vacancies at good prices... My friend and colleague, Ed Perkins, has recently waxed rhapsodic about the new high-speed train in Italy called the Italo, which twice a day makes the run in each direction between Milan and Naples (via Bologna, Florence and Rome) at speeds of 200 miles an hour. The train is unusually pleasant, says Ed. He points out that in eight out of nine countries recently visited by him--China, South Korea, Poland, France, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany and Italy--high-speed rail is more and more available.
 
On this past Sunday's Travel Show (www.wor710.com/arthur-frommer), Pauline and I were asked whether some European countries require that you have 18 months of validity remaining on your passport, in order to come into that country. We answered, resoundingly, No. Where do false rumors of that sort originate?... The remarkable bargains on cruises of the Mediterranean are starting to spread into July and August, and will undoubtedly become even more attractive as we approach those months. Example: On the July 9 sailing of the Norwegian Spirit, spending 12 nights at sea from Barcelona to Venice, inside cabins are now offered for as little as $699 ($58 a day). On the July 28 sailing of Royal Caribbean's Serenade of the Seas, 12 nights round-trip from Barcelona, inside cabins are $799 per person ($67 a day). Go to Vacations To Go (www.vacationstogo.com) for more... Another big current travel bargain? It's India, where the Rupee has now plunged to a rate of 55 to the dollar, and will probably go lower... And note, too, that the Euro is now selling for $1.25, reducing the cost of European expenditures, once you pay a high airfare to get there.
 
Where isn't it cheap to vacation? At a Disney theme park, for one. Disneyland has just raised a one-day adult admission to $87 (including tax), and the one-day park-hopper pass for a family of four now amounts to $488 at both Disneyland in California and Disney World in Florida... Exercise extreme caution if you fly anywhere on Spirit Airlines. That generous carrier will now charge (starting November 1) $100 per small suitcase brought into the plane and placed in an overhead rack -- provided that the carry-on luggage isn't earlier declared at the check-in counter. The infamous Ben Baldanza (Spirit's president) has thus done it again... A less expensive means of flying the Atlantic? It's nearly always on Aer Lingus, to any major European capital via a stop in Dublin. Example: a late July flight from New York to Amsterdam, returning mid-August, all on Aer Lingus via Dublin: $911. The same flight non-stop to and from Amsterdam via KLM: $1,286. But note that Aer Lingus flights are filling fast, requiring a quick decision on your part.
 
Finally, readers of this blog who have young children will confirm that it is growing increasingly difficult to arrange to sit next to their children in standard economy class. That's because larger and larger portions of economy areas are being classified as "premium economy seats" requiring surcharges of as much as $39 per seat. So few seats remain in standard economy that parents have difficulty finding adjoining seats for their children. This past week, Senator Charles Schumer complained of the situation to the Department of Transportation, urging that premium economy surcharges be waived for young children. Though it seems inconceivable that the D.O.T. will thus interfere in airline pricing, it also seems possible for the airlines to urge their flight attendants to request of economy passengers that they change seats within economy sections to enable young families to sit together.

If it had happened only once, I would have thought it an oddity. But twice in the past month, I've been able to obtain better prices and available accommodations by going directly to a hotel instead of to the hotel online travel agencies that claim to represent the world's hotels.
 
To obtain reservations at a British hotel for a trip I will be making later this year, I went to not one but two major hotel online travel agencies, both of which responded that the hotel was full on the dates I had requested. They had also earlier listed rates for that hotel that seemed unusually high.
 
On the brink of giving up, I decided to phone the hotel in question. And immediately, the hotel's reservations staff not only accepted my request for a reservation on the dates in question, but at a price considerably lower than the online travel agencies had earlier quoted. I was left with the inescapable impression that the hotel was closing out the various OTAs for desirable dates when the hotel felt it could rent its rooms without paying the large commissions (sometimes as much as 30%) that some of the famous OTAs demand.
 
Is it possible that smart hotels are working with OTAs only for dates of stay when the hotel is anticipating widespread vacancies? I'm ready to believe that. And henceforth, I will call the hotel directly in place of wasting my time on the internet OTAs.
 
In the world of car rentals, I used to believe that a particular auto rental website was capable of performing near-miracles in responding to my request for a car; that they were finding car rental companies -- including the biggest of them -- that had slashed the rates dramatically for the dates when I needed a car. I am not totally certain about this, and have only conjectures to make (although I have made a couple of test bookings that confirmed the worst), but I have also been told that persons making a recent real use of that website are claiming that the major auto rental companies (Hertz, Avis, Budget, Enterprise, National, etc.) are no longer giving their dramatically discounted products to the internet firm.
 
Whether this is the case will need further tests, but it appears possible that the biggest rental companies are no longer cooperating to the same extent as before with the bargain-seeking website, and that users of the site are being offered cars from secondary firms only.
 
So here's a major turnaround in the ability of internet online travel agencies to produce unique bargains in hotel rooms and auto rentals. It's as if the luddites--the people unwilling to hand over their businesses to those modern, new, electronic services--have decided to do battle with the internet. There's never a dull moment in travel. And it is possible that by going direct--by phoning the hotels or the car renters--you'll often do better in terms of availability and price.

All the world is now aware of the Al Qaeda suicide bomber in Yemen who blew himself up this past Monday, killing more than eighty members of a military unit who were rehearsing for a parade, in addition to wounding hundreds of spectators. As the New York Times reported on Tuesday morning, the bombing occurred "soon after the discovery of the third attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard a United States-bound jetliner by Qaeda militants based in Yemen."
 
such an event serves to highlight the point -- as any fair-minded observer will, in my view, agree -- that it is no longer necessary for terrorists to break into the cockpit of a plane to bring it down, as they did on 9/11. And passengers aboard such a plane will no longer be able to subdue a terrorist who enters the lavatory of a plane to detonate the explosives he carries on his person, or who slips through intelligence efforts by the C.I.A. and others to discover such terrorists before they reach an airport. The only remaining line of defense is the TSA, examining passengers before they board the plane and often patting them down, in addition to using explosives-detecting swabs.
 
Those self-evident conclusions, in my opinion, make awfully weak the continuing din of fierce attacks on the thoroughness with which the TSA fulfills its responsibility to keep us safe. Rather than regard the TSA's work as an anti-American, un-constitutional invasion of our liberties, I look upon our cooperation with the TSA as a patriotic act, as an assertion by the thousands of people who go through particular airport terminals each day that they are determined to keep flying despite terrorist threats, that they are engaging in a joint, communal, all-American effort to assist the TSA to defeat the terrorists.
 
You may recall that several days ago, I challenged the critics of the TSA to make positive suggestions, to tell us what they would substitute for the present procedures of the TSA In their comments (elsewhere in this blog), you will note that the majority rely on the work and rhetoric of a self-anointed so-called security expert named Bruce Schneier, author of books on cryptography and digital security, publisher of a newsletter called "Cryptogram" and a similar blog. I ploughed through the two major essays by Bruce Schneier on the TSA and, so help me, there isn't a single reasoned explanation of what he would suggest in place of the TSA, other than to vaguely state that its procedures should possess "accountability" and "transparency," whatever that means.
 
Indeed, at the end of his labored criticism of TSA tactics, he urges us to have a stiff upper lip, to assume that the terrorists will actually succeed in blowing up planes, and to face that outcome with American-style bravery. He ends his second major essay (cited by the critics of my opinions), in which he has fulminated against TSA efforts to keep terrorists off planes, saying that if we passengers refuse to be terrorized, "then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed."
 
."..[E]ven if their attacks succeed." In other words, if we go to our deaths with courage, then we win.
 
And by the way, earlier in the essay, he grudgingly admits it was TSA security checkpoints that earlier caused the failure of the Christmas attempt to blow up a bomb on a U.S. airliner. Because of the TSA checkpoints, he points out, Al Qaeda was not able to use metallic detonators, but had to adopt a faulty, awkward use of a syringe setting off a largely-failed twenty-minute effort in the lavatory to ignite the explosives carried by the would-be bomber. "The security checkpoints worked...," he writes.
 
So when you read these continuing efforts by writers we thought were serious, attempting to ridicule the TSA's work and make it into an un-American incursion on our liberties, ask yourself the question that I have repeated over and over: what do they suggest? Should we simply walk onto planes without undergoing security checks? Shall we really revert to pre-9/11 procedures that failed so miserably on the morning of 9/11? Or should we cooperate with the TSA and together work towards the defeat of terrorism.

The world is anxiously awaiting resolution of the economic crisis in Greece, a situation that could -- if badly handled -- gravely affect the European economy -- and ours. So please don't think that the impact of that crisis on pleasure-seeking tourists should be a central concern of anyone.

But tourism to Greece is of tremendous importance to that nation, which receives many millions of annual visitors going not simply to Athens and the Peloponnese, or to those cruiseship stops at Santorini and Mykonos, but also to the big Greek islands of Crete and Corfu (where tourism is a giant industry). And the economic crisis could be either devastating or helpful to Greece. It could be devastating if civil disorder were to break out among the Greek population (already, tourism is said to be down by nearly 40% because of tourist fears).

It could be enormously helpful if Greece successfully left the so-called Eurozone and restored use of its earlier currency, the Drachma. That money unit would then be so weak, and so dramatically devalued, as to set off an avalanche of increased tourism by bargain-seekers in both Europe and the United States. Indeed, use of a devalued Drachma is regarded by many as offering a tremendous benefit to Greece.

So we'll have to be watching with careful concern. And if the Drachma is restored, then those bargain-seeking tourists among us might perform a mighty service to Greece by immediately rushing to confer their spending on a newly cheap country. I should also draw attention to the fact that a decision by a new Greek government to say goodbye to the European Union might also set off a similar movement by Spain and Italy. What a time we're living through.

In my former life as a young lawyer, I used to hear the advice of experienced litigators as to what you should do if your case was weak on the facts and weak on the law. In that circumstance, I was told, "You yell like hell."
 
That apparently is the strategy of the several readers who have thus far responded with comments to my blog of several days ago, in which I welcomed the thoroughness shown by TSA agents at airports in fulfilling their responsibility to prevent terrorists from boarding planes with explosives on their person. The TSA's goal and their duty, we should always remember, is to keep the rest of us from dying in a plane crash.
 
The responses -- all but one of them -- have thus far consisted of sheer invective (defined in the dictionary as "abusive language, vituperation"), descending to a level lower than I for one have seen.
 
Rather than respond to such outrage, I should like to suggest an experiment. I should like to ask the critics to do something positive, to suggest how they would replace the TSA and with what. Are they actually suggesting that we should simply board planes in the future without undergoing any security checks at all? (Who among us would feel easy about doing that?) They we should rely entirely on counter-intelligence personnel working away from airports? What about the suicide bombers that aren't apprehended by C.I.A. agents before they reach an airport? Are they suggesting that racial profiling would do the trick?
 
Are they suggesting we replace federal employees with private persons earning the minimum wage?
 
In light of the photographs that have been published of Al Qaeda's earlier use of padded, long-john underwear covering arms, legs and torsos with pouches of explosives, are they actually claiming that pat-downs serve no purpose, and can be dispensed with?
 
What in the world do they suggest we do? Dispense with security checks altogether? Replace caution with sheer bravado? Simply take our chances? Become brave Uncle Sams who simply stroll into airports and challenge the world's terrorists to take down our planes? What are their positive recommendations? Can they compose a comment or two in which they actually set forth how they would replace the TSA with something more effective?
 
So let the critics weigh in with something positive. Let them put up or quiet down.

Until recently, I have not known anyone who has ever visited the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In fact, I had scarcely heard of it. An impressive, two-wing structure given over to temporary exhibits of far-our art (including a great deal of video art), it has been in existence, as best I know, for no more than a decade (the east wing, a separate Museum of Modern Art, is older), and has been generally overlooked by the many travel writers who have penned guidebooks to Paris.
 
But it deserves greater attention. My daughter Pauline returned this past week from a stay in Paris, full of enthusiasm for the Palais de Tokyo's current display of anthropological subjects captured in abstract oils. And she was similarly impressed by the museum's unusual and intriguing schedule of daily exhibition hours: from noon until midnight. This means that visitors can have a compelling evening activity in Paris for the reasonable outlay of €8, the museum's price of admission.
 
Apart from this novel addition to the city's famed art scene, Pauline was impressed by the number of one-day cooking schools available to the English-speaking visitor. Apparently, such instruction is presented in both French and English during the fall/winter/spring, and then entirely in English during the tourist-heavy summer months. At the more than 30 such schools in Paris, at least three of them -- Cook 'n With Class, La Cuisine de Paris, and Cucina di Terresa -- permitted students to attend simply for a few hours on one day, and thus to hone their skills at a limited number of dishes. Pauline raved about the heavenly vegetarian cuisine that was prepared at Cucina di Terresa, and although the cost of one-day's attendance was a stiff €80, that was for three hours of instruction and also included eating a full dinner.
 
A highlight of her stay was a walking tour of the Tuileries Gardens conducted by the impressive, Europe-wide (many cities) Context Travel (www.contexttravel.com), whose highly-intellectual walking tours are led by Ph.D.-level guides and deal with profound subjects of cultural and historical importance, in this case associated with Paris. Astonishingly enough, when 12 persons arrived for this particular tour, they were divided into two groups of six persons apiece, each with their own individual guide, so that the locale would not be demeaned by an overly-numerous group of tourists. Pauline's guide was herself a director of a distinguished group of artistic conservators whose office is in the Louvre. The other tour was led by an American who is pursuing a graduate degree in art history in Paris. You make advance reservations for these tours by accessing the Context website listed above.
 
Because she was in Paris on Sunday, May 6, the day of the French presidential elections, Pauline learned about the outcome from the highly-excited wait staff of a restaurant where she was having dinner. She immediately rushed by metro to the Place de la Bastille (jail of the ancien regime that was demolished, and its staff wiped out, on July 14, 1789, at the start of the French Revolution), where enthusiasts of French-President-Elect Francois Hollande were gathered to hear his victory speech later that evening. And in the run-up to that event, she partied with an immense crowd of mainly-young people shouting "Vive la France!" "Vive Hollande!"
 
The joys of travel. A springtime trip to France brought her such memorable encounters.

For many months the Internet has been full of smug comments about the efforts of TSA agents to ensure aviation security. Can you imagine? they'd sneer. Grandmothers in wheelchairs have been patted down. Elderly gentlemen have had their trousers, and the legs within them, examined for explosives. All of us have been inconvenienced, or had our privacy invaded, by these overly zealous federal employees.
 
Now, with the news out of Yemen about an attempted Al Qaeda plot to pack explosives into underwear pouches, those sarcastic criticisms of the TSA's misplaced zealotry seem a bit weak, don't they? It seems undeniable that the world's terrorists are still hell-bent on bringing down U.S.-bound or U.S.-originating airplanes with "undetectable" explosives. And I for one will be grateful for the half-hour delays in boarding flights that are caused by TSA agents patting down the arms, legs, and torsos of passengers.
 
I wonder whether the authors of these caustic anecdotes about TSA extremism will lapse into silence in the days ahead. And though I fully expect them to persist in their smug arrogance about the foolishness of TSA procedures, or about claims that full-body scanners are an expensive waste, I hope that all of us will read their renewed criticism with the careful analysis that such diatribes should receive. Let's hope that in the days ahead, TSA uses pat-down procedures even more frequently and extensively than before.

You're undoubtedly aware that I'm greatly in favor of learning vacations, the summer interludes when you return to the equivalent of your college days, to the liberal arts. The two outstanding vacations of that sort are the Oxford Experience at Oxford University in England, and the Cambridge University International Summer School in Cambridge, England. But nearly all the most popular courses in those two summer programs have been full since April, as I had occasion to learn this past week.
 
But that leaves two U.S. learning vacations that are both the full equivalent of anything England has to offer.
 
One of them is Cornell's Adult University in Ithaca New York. Its one-week courses -- and you can stay for either one, two, three or four weeks -- run from July 8 to August 4, are attended by every sort of person, include all three meals daily, an afternoon cocktail hour, and cover subjects ranging from classical music to wine tasting and the literary works of the Bronte Sisters. There are literally dozens of different courses, all on the Cornell campus, with lodgings in an ultra-modern student residence. It's one of the most exhilarating summer vacations -- I gloried in it last summer -- and you can learn more by going to a website for Cornell's Adult University (www.sce.cornell.edu/cau).
 
And then there's an equally profound series of one-week summer vacations at St. John's College, which has two campuses -- one in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the other in Annapolis, Maryland. Both of them run summer sessions for adults -- learning without examinations, without grades, simply pursued for the love of learning, and involving the reading and discussion of the great books of the Western tradition. The Santa Fe session runs for three weeks from July 8 to July 27, the Annapolis session runs for one week from June 4 to June 8. And you can learn more by googling "summer classics" at St. John's.

You've just turned on your computer to access your e-mail, when suddenly you're confronted with an immediate emergency. Your grandson aged 19, or else a friend in his fifties, or your former assistant at the corporation for which you worked, is sending you an urgent, electronic plea for help. They are either in a foreign hospital, with a slightly disabling ailment, or in a foreign jail -- in Paris, let's say -- for having inadvertently violated a traffic rule. And they can't get out of either the hospital or jail without paying a bill of seven hundred and fifty dollars. Can you please wire the money?
 
So help me, I actually received such a plea for help less than two years ago. And I came close to wiring the money until I first had the sense to attempt to verify the claim. It wasn't easy. The criminal who concocted the scheme -- and that person must have sent the plea to at least fifty different persons in one day -- had obtained amazingly realistic information about the identity of my grandson, friend or acquaintance from various social media sites where that information had been posted for all to see. The popularity of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, and the easy access to personal information appearing on those sites, has greatly expanded the opportunities to use common travel predicaments as the setting for scams.
 
I've now heard of numerous people who have received these summertime appeals for help, supposedly sent by a friend who was traveling in Europe or Southeast Asia. And I know of well-meaning sorts who have actually wired the money.
 
Travel scams are on the rise. They are skyrocketing in number and in size. They used to be confined to offers of free trips or stays that actually required attendance at heavy-handed solicitations to buy time-shares. But the people selling time-shares are pikers when compared with the crooks who are now dominating the travel scene.
 
The lesser form of scams involves the use of robo-calls. Your telephone rings, you pick up the receiver, and in quick order you first hear the sound of seagulls, then of waves breaking on the shore, then various bars of maritime-like music, and then the stentorian speech of a gravelly-voiced announcer saying: "This is your captain speaking and I'm inviting you on a cruise -- a free-of-charge cruise".
 
You ultimately pay the small amount of taxes and fees associated with that cruise -- the actual sailing is supposedly free of charge -- and find yourself confined to the deck of a ferry traveling from a port in eastern Florida to the Bahamas, a "cruise" of about two hours. You don't receive a cabin. The small amount you've paid for phony fees and taxes is actually triple the size of a ticket for deck passage that you could have bought on the very same ferry.
 
The scams currently on view in the world of travel are endlessly ingenious. Some of them tell you that you are the lucky winner of a contest -- that you will be receiving a free vacation simply for paying a registration fee. The reason so many people succumb to these phony announcements is that there actually are legitimate contests, and some people are correctly chosen as winners. But those people receive a registered letter announcing they have won -- and not a recorded phone call. The receipt of a registered letter is perhaps the only persuasive evidence that a contest is on the up-and-up.
 
Beyond that, the would-be traveler must simply bear in mind the ancient adage: There is no such thing as a free lunch. In this time of travel scams, it's more important than ever to be constantly guarded and alert.