Pardon the hyperbole, but to me, the biggest recent news in travel was the fight that broke out between a female air passenger who wanted to recline her seat, and a male passenger sitting behind her who attempted to block her from doing that by inserting a rigid plastic doodad into his fold-out tray. When her complaint to a flight attendant failed to cause the male passenger to remove the block, she dumped a container of water on his head. The resulting altercation caused the pilot to make an emergency landing. My take on the rights and wrongs of this situation? If an airline installs seats that are capable of reclining, then passengers have an absolute right to recline their seats.
The editor of Yankee magazine, dealing with the six New England states, has stoutly denied that the unusually severe winter weather of a few months ago will have any real impact on the colorful emergence of the "fall foliage" in New England. In his opinion (and he's been following these patterns for nearly 40 years), leaves on the trees of New England will turn turn orange, red and yellow at more or less the same dates as in past years. And he expects a glorious foliage season this auitumn, well justifying a trip by you to Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island or Connecticut.
Copying the words of Bob Marley, the island of Jamaica has just announced a program of 50% hotel discounts ("GetAllRight.Com") for persons who vacation there during the upcoming autumn months (and until December 15). When combined with the island's longtime "Meet the People" program that invites visitors into the homes of residents, for an intimate contact with Jamaica's culture and lifestyles, GetAllRight.Com supplies a powerful incentive for choosing Jamaica over other Caribbean locations in the upcoming months.
An important tour operator to the Middle East has just eliminated the nation of Qatar from the places it promotes. Almost alone among responsible Middle East countries, Qatar has shown outright support for the thugs and barbarians of the ISIS movement that recently beheaded an American journalist. The tour operator, Ya'lla Travel, will no longer send tourists to Qatar and presumably will cancel the bookings it already has for Qatar.
Animal advocates are belittling the recent announcement of Sea World theme parks that they will increase the size of the water tanks in which they place the large whales that periodically perform for the public. "PETA" (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has claimed that a distinct fall-off in the number of people going to Sea World's parks in Orlando, SanDiego, and elsewhere, has caused this belated concern for these large water creatures, not a real regard for them. Apparently, the new enlarged tanks will not be completed until 2016, if then, and PETA continues to urge the public not to attend Sea Worlds.
Additional tour operators to Ireland---like the well-known SceptreTours.Com--have now announced bargain packages to the Emerald Isle for persons seeking vacations there in fall and winter. So Sceptre joins AerLingusVacationStore.com, whose remarkably low prices--as little as $799 for a week's stay, including round-trip trans-Atlantic airfare--were discussed by me in a recent blog. The bargain competitor to these Irish companies is a single tour operator, ChinaSpree.com, offering rock-bottom-priced air-and-land packages.to Beijing and Shanghai in January and February of 2015.
