The Next Hot Tourist Spot is Out of This World

The next hot tourist spot: space. Does that sound far-fetched? Maybe not. A recent announcement from Russia said that country -- the only one that can deliver people in orbit -- planned to open a space hotel by 2016. The facility would accommodate up to seven guests. “Flying to space may have seemed like a utopian idea of Jules Verne and his likes, however, the last few decades have proved all skeptics wrong,” says Tourism-Review.com. For the planned Russian hotel, food will be delivered from the earth, and warmed up in microwave ovens. It won’t be fast food, however, and nothing will be cheap about this enterprise. Developers say hotel guests will be paying around US$170,000 for a five-day stay, plus another $800,000 to ride the space shuttle transfer to the hotel. Price has long been an issue when it comes to space travel but it also cropped up in the early days of regularly scheduled airlines, which of course have considerably reduced prices (while adding numerous fees) in recent years. Right here on earth, a harbinger of the future is being built in New Mexico. While the passengers need to wait for a couple of more years (first flights expected in two years), those interested in the topic now have a unique opportunity to explore Spaceport America being built there by space fan and Virgin founder Richard Branson. It recently launched tours for the curious and would-be buyers. Tickets for the suborbital space rides aboard SpaceShipTwo cost $200,000. The 150-minute flights will give space tourists around five minutes of weightlessness. Virgin Galactic has said that it already has more than $50 million in reservations for the flights. “If you think of Earth's orbit and the moon as a big unclaimed territory, ripe for adventure, then you're in for a treat,” says Postmedia News. ”The space excursions now being planned promise nothing less than a new perspective of life on Earth and an expansion of what it means to be human.” Recent news stories have raised various possibilities: Quick flights to see planet earth from space Honeymooning in hotels orbiting the earth Rover races on the moon. More than 500 people by now have gone to space -- mainly astronauts and cosmonauts. But then there are the seven tourists who have already been to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz rockets. But they paid millions of dollars each for their trips, $35 million in the case of the last tourist, the Canadian founder of the Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberte. ``Space is no longer an insurmountable boundary,'' said Harold Line, a Calgary businessman who has paid the $20,000 deposit on a $200,000 US ticket aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. Virgin Galactic's website provides a preview of what passengers should feel during the separation from the other aircraft at 50,000 feet and the immediate jolt thereafter. ``You are instantly pinned back into your seat, overwhelmed but enthralled by the howl of the rocket motor and the eye-watering acceleration which, as you watch the readout, has you travelling in a matter of seconds at almost 2,500 mph, over three times the speed of sound. As you hurtle through the edges of the atmosphere, the large windows show the cobalt blue sky turning to mauve and indigo and finally to black. You're on a high; this is really happening, you're loving it and you're coping well.'' SpaceShipTwo will float in weightlessness in an area of space considered sub- orbital because it is not high enough for spacecraft to complete a full orbit of the planet. The spacecraft will linger for a bit before at first falling, then gliding, back to Earth and to a landing strip at Virgin's New Mexico Spaceport. Stephanie Anevich is a Toronto travel agent whose company, Vision 2000 Travel Group, has booked 10 of the 21 Canadians who are among the 440 people who've paid their deposits on their Virgin Galactic tickets. ``They won't fly it until they are very sure it's safe,'' she says, noting that Richard Branson will fly with his family on the inaugural flight. What else might happen in space? Perhaps more announced space hotels, says John Spencer, an architect specializing in the design of spacecraft interiors and space-related theme parks. He also foresees space yachts where the super-rich will invite their friends to come up for a week. Oceangoing yachts can cost $400 million, he said, so why not have space yachts? In lieu of the long-gone space race between the US and Russia, there’s already a “space race” by private enterprise ventures, says Tom Shelley. His Virginia-based Space Adventures is offering sub-orbital flights for $110,000 a seat, $90,000 cheaper than Virgin Galactic. Space Adventures was behind the first eight visits by tourists to the space station (one man went twice). And it still has one $150 million ticket left to sell on Space Adventure's planned 2015 lunar mission on a Soyuz rocket that will fly two passengers around the moon and back. The vehicle will not land but it will be the first human visit to the moon since 1972. This could make it the history’s most expensive trips. But Shelley says the view of earth from the moon should not be missed. By David Wilkening

(Source: Travelmole.com)

Nepalese Mouse Brings Airline to a Standstill

A stowaway mouse that leapt out of a beverage box on a Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) flight kept the airline’s flagship B757 grounded for 11 hours.

Planes are not allowed to take off with rodents on the loose. Apart from the reaction they can cause among passengers (and cabin crew), there are obvious hygiene issues. More importantly, mice and rats can chew through vital cables.

Rodents can’t be poisoned in case they die in a concealed location and cause a stink.

The mouse compelled the airline to cancel its morning flight to Bangkok as well as delaying its midnight flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Eventually airline staff came up with a hi-tech solution — a mousetrap.

The mouse found the trap, which deployed in the customary way with terminal results.

“We have found the mouse, and the plane has been released,” a relieved engineer Shankar Thapa told Nepalese news source Republica.

“But the flight to Kuala Lumpur [scheduled for 11.30 pm] will be delayed as we are still searching to make sure there aren’t any more rodents in the plane.”

The runaway mouse arrived at a bad time for NAC, as the Nepalese flag carrier’s only other Boeing is in Israel for maintenance. As a result, the airline had to transfer 133 Bangkok-bound passengers to Thai Airways and pay for five-star accommodation for 63 passengers in Bangkok.

The 190-seater’s flight to Kuala Lumpur and return flight were both full, meaning NAC would have had to pay for five-star accommodation for passengers in Kathmandu and Kuala Lumpur, had the mouse not been found in time.

As it was, passengers were inconvenienced and the airline faces a hefty bill. But the smallest player in the drama came off worst.

Written by : Peter Needham

(Source: eGlobaltravelmedia.com.au)

London Hoteliers Prepare for 2012 Olympics

Hoteliers in this legendary hotel city are undoubtedly excited about the prospects of the 2012 Olympics being held in their backyards, but they’re not looking at the single event as an end-all-be-all proposition.

After all, London has operated at nearly 90% occupancy for most of this summer. And besides the Olympics in late July and early August, it will host The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in early June 2012 and the Paralympics in late August and early September 2012.

Danny Bowerin of Deloitte and London 2012 said during a STR Global client event Tuesday that preparations for the Olympics have been a tremendous success story thus far, but there’s no doubt next summer will be “business as unusual.”

“There is going to be significant disruption, but we’ll all think post-Games that it will be all worthwhile,” Bowerin said.

“London hotels must be asking themselves, ‘How much more business can we take in during summer season,’” said Nick Pattie of Whitebridge Hospitality. “We’ll see something close to 100% occupancy during the 17 days of Olympics.”

But that doesn’t mean there will be a rate boom in the city during the Games.

“It’s only 17 days—let’s keep it in perspective,” said Ciaran Fahy, GM of the independent Cavendish Hotel.

Fahy said his top priority is protecting the hotel’s inventory during the special events.

“I’m here to say I’m optimizing my inventory. I’m not gouging my customer on price,” he said. “I’m looking for a full length of stay, and I don’t make any apologies about that.”

“Of the 17 days it really is the front end that will be really strong demand, then it will taper off,” said Duncan Bramwell of Revenue-Performance.com. “The first thing we’ve been working on with our independent clients is getting them to look at summer in totality. There is going to be this extraordinary summer, and making sure we are ready for the entire spread of events rather than just getting greedy and jumping on the bandwagon for those couple of days is what we should be thinking.”

Tracy Halliwell of London & Partners said the 13,500 hotel rooms under construction will bring the city’s inventory to about 120,000 by the time the Olympics begin.

Halliwell said despite rumors, there will be little in the way of temporary guest accommodations supply added in London by cruise ships.

“We don’t have berthing space for a lot of big ships. What berths there are will be full,” she said.

A focus on meeting space
Gower Tan of InterContinental Hotels Group said a large number of his company’s inventory in the London area has been committed to Olympics organizers.

“We’ve been focusing on non-rooms revenue streams and demands for non-rooms business,” he said. “We’re planning our business mix and looking at what we can do to drive meeting business (during the Games).”

As for the inventory that is available to the public, he said IHG’s priority is meeting the needs of its tops corporate clients and its Priority Club guest-loyalty club members.

Beyond that, the company is placing restrictions about prepayment and minimum length of stays during the Olympics, he said.

IHG has some concerns about post-Olympic demand for its large concentration of rooms in London, according to Tan.

“We’re working on business that has legacy business afterwards,” he said.

Fahy said no hotel should lose sight of the opportunity brought upon by a strong hotel environment regardless of the 2012 events.

“We are in the best position to get corporate increases to get rates back up to 2001 and to educate our sales staff to not be embarrassed about that,” he said, stressing that hotel salespeople need to focus on attaining best-available-rates regardless of the source.

Some concerns
The panelists showed some concern over how the Olympics and other events will affect regular customers who are displaced by the once-in-a-lifetime events.

“Will London damage some of its regular customers?” Pattie asked.

“Olympic host cities experience leisure visitor displacement in the year prior to the start of the Games,” London & Partners’ Halliwell said, citing fear of higher prices and the inconvenience of preparations for the Games as major reasons those travelers don’t make visits.

There’s also some concern about how the number of people descending upon London will affect the infrastructure and complicate the lives of hotel employees.

For instance, Halliwell said an extra 250,000 a day will use public transportation.

The other concern among hoteliers is the possibility that some of the rooms committed to the London Olympics organizing group will be released and whether hotels have time to react to having more inventory available. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games has options to release rooms in three phases leading up the Olympics but doesn’t think it will need to do so, Halliwell said.

“We have to think about, as hoteliers, what is our plan B, what is our plan C and what is our plan D, and when do you make decisions to implement them in the months ahead,” Bramwell said. “If you have a problem and one of your block releases, what are you going to do? Where are the markets you are going to pursue? Are we brave enough to overbook?”

He said during major global events in the past, hoteliers panicked when faced with rooms released from organizing committees. Having backup plans will allow hotels to optimize their inventories in the event of such occurrences in London.

Learning from the past
Konstanze Auernheimer, director of marketing and analysis for STR Global (a sister company of HotelNewsNow.com), provided background during the session of the past four Summer Olympics cities. Some general observations included:

• Atlanta (1996) and Beijing (2008) had a lot of new supply coming into the market while Sydney (2000) and Athens (2004) didn’t have as much. “Beijing was an emerging market with about 140,000 rooms,” Auernheimer said. “The additional supply in the market actually hurt the market.”

• The number of hotels in the London pipeline is on par with Athens and Sydney.

• The Games generated little additional demand in Atlanta because they displaced much of the meetings, incentives, conference and exhibitions business the city usually attracts during the summer. Sydney saw a limited occupancy spike during the Games. Athens experienced a huge spike in demand because August generally is a slow month for the city’s hotel industry. Beijing had a decrease in demand, thanks in large part to the additional supply, tight control of visas and political protests. “Obviously, a lot of people come into the market, but a lot of times it’s displacement,” she said. “If you are lucky, it is displacement into another month.”

• Average daily rate in Atlanta and Sydney jumped nearly 80% and 90%, respectively, during the Olympics. Athens and Beijing had ADR increases in the 250% range. Auernheimer said one of the challenges for London is to avoid the negativity that comes with such large ADR increases.

Find London Accommodation at http://www.metrostar.com/london/

September 2011
By Jeff Higley
Editorial Director
jeff@hotelnewsnow.com

Rock Star Faces Flight Crackdown for Wearing Pants too Low

One of America’s most talented musicians, Billie Joe Armstrong, has been kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight because his pants sagged too low.

Armstrong, who works occasionally as an actor, is better known as lead vocalist, main songwriter and lead guitarist for the US punk rock band Green Day. He’s also a guitarist and vocalist for the punk band Pinhead Gunpowder.

The rock musician was travelling from Oakland near San Francisco to Burbank Los Angeles when the pants incident occurred.

“Just got kicked off a Southwest flight because my pants sagged too low! What the f**k? No joke!” Armstrong tweeted indignantly.

It seems Armstrong may have been guilty of “sagging” – the term for wearing trousers (slacks, shorts, pants or jeans) hanging below the waist area and therefore revealing underwear.

A female passenger aboard the flight gave US news network ABC News the low-down. Passengers were already seated for takeoff, she said, when a flight attendant approached Armstrong and told him to pull his trousers up. Armstrong retorted: “Don’t you have better things to do than worry about that?”

The flight attendant then insisted the pants be hoisted higher. Armstrong replied “I’m just trying to get to my f**king seat” whereupon Armstrong and his travelling companion were removed from the flight.

In June, a football player, Deshon Marman, was evicted from a US Airways flight over saggy pants and is reportedly suing the airline over it.

Sagging, which often reveals buttocks and/or underwear, faces a widening crackdown by authorities, who consider the practice offensive and unsavoury. The Texas city of Fort Worth moved two months ago to ban passengers from boarding buses while wearing sagging pants that expose underwear or buttocks. Signs have been posted reading: “Pull ’em up or find another ride”.

The origins of sagging are obscure. The fashion is widely believed to derive from the US prison system, where belts are prohibited. Whatever, sagging is spreading.

In a similar case last month, a female financial consultant and former model claimed she was ordered off a JetBlue flight, not because she was sagging but because the flight director accused her of not wearing any panties.

Financial advisor Malinda Knowles is suing JetBlue, claiming that one of the airline’s supervisors thrust a walkie-talkie between her legs in an attempt to work out what she was wearing under her baggy T-shirt.

Knowles claims the supervisor told her, “‘I don’t want to see your panties or anything but do you have any on?”

The sagging and panties incidents follow a spate of strange in-flight happenings around the world. Some have involved passengers urinating in aircraft aisles and over other passengers. In other cases, passengers have stripped naked.

Written by : Peter Needham

(Source: eglobaltravelmedia.com)

Top 10 Most Expensive Cities for Hotels

The Telegraph in the UK has released its annual list of the world’s most expensive cities for hotel stays. Here they are:

No.1 Moscow

For the seventh year running, Moscow tops the list when it comes to the cost of a hotel room. A night in the Russian capital will set business travellers back an average of US$420, about US$54 more expensive than its closest rival city.

No.2 Geneva

A night in the lakeside tourist capital will cost an average of US$366, up 13 percent on last year's figures.

No.3 Zurich

The average cost of a room is US$354. Of the Top 10 cities, Zurich has experienced the second highest increase in its hotel prices, up 17 percent on last year's prices.

No.4 Paris

Up five percent on last year's figures, the average cost of a hotel room rate in Paris has risen to US$334 per night.

No.5 Stockholm

A stop over in Stockholm will set business travellers back an average of US$325 for the night.

No.6 Washington

Hotels in America's Washington came in at sixth most expensive for business travellers, costing an average of US$320 per night.

No.7 Sydney

Sydney saw a room rate price rise of 16 percent on last year's figures. The average cost per night for a hotel room in Australia's largest city comes in at US$317.

No. 8 Istanbul

Istanbul achieved the highest increase in hotel rate - of 37 per cent - due to the growing interest surrounding the city as a business destination.

No.9 New York

Prices for a New York hotel room didn't change year on year, so business travellers should still expect to pay an average of US$312 per night in the Big Apple.

No.10 Oslo

A hotel room in Oslo also costs an average of US$312 per night, up 11 percent on last year's prices.

Jetstar Passenger Chokes to Death on Beef Dinner

A man has apparently choked to death on his in-flight meal while flying Jetstar from Singapore to Auckland.

The New Zealand Herald reported that Robert Rippingale died after choking on a beef dinner. His girlfriend sat beside his body in a crew rest area for the rest of the 11-hour flight.

Rippingale, 31, was pronounced dead aboard by a doctor 90 minutes after takeoff, the paper said.

The deceased man’s girlfriend, Vanessa Preechakul, was quoted as saying that the two were “kissing, holding hands and the next minute he was choking”.

Rippingale had chosen the beef dinner rather than chicken and was tucking into the meal while watching a movie when Preechakul realised that something had gone very wrong.

After thinking initially that her boyfriend was laughing hard, “then I looked at his face and his eyes were rolling and he couldn’t talk. His lips were turning purple”.

Preechakul screamed for help and a doctor and two nurses who were on the flight rushed up and performed CPR on the victim in the galley. Sadly, they were unable to save him.

Jetstar spokesman Andrew McGinnes expressed condolences to the victim’s family and thanked the doctor and nurses who had tried to save Rippingale.

But today’s edition of New Zealand’s Waikato Times quotes a passenger on the flight, Hamilton city councillor Ewan Wilson, a former pilot and Kiwi Air founder, expressing surprise that the airline offered passengers a NZD100 travel voucher to compensate them for the trauma.

Wilson said he watched in horror as Rippingale’s body was carried away and put in a crew rest area for the rest of the flight. Wilson said he felt “that going back to Singapore would have been a lot more appropriate”. He was surprised the plane didn’t immediately divert, as “the general practice for an airline is to land as soon as possible if there is a medical emergency” and there were plenty of places around to land.

Wilson said passengers were “visibly shaken and very shocked” by the mid-air drama and accompanying scream.

Jetstar, however, said that Preechakul had been keen for the flight to to press on to Auckland. New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority confirmed that there were no guidelines or laws on how pilots should act in such an emergency, the Waikato Times reported.

The cause of death remains officially unknown until a coroner’s report, which is expected later this month.

Choking while eating can occur in flight, as anywhere else. In 2002, a three-year-old boy choked on his meal during a flight from Britain to the Canary Islands.

The boy was in danger of dying and no doctor or nurse was aboard the plane. It was left to a firefighter to do the best he could and use a resuscitation technique he had only ever practised once – on a dummy. It worked and he saved the boy’s life.

Written by Peter Needham

American Says New “Turndown Service” is a First

Pajamas and slippers are among new bed amenities offered to American Airlines “Premium Class” passengers, the airline announced. Travelers in first class between the US and London Heathrow will be the first to be offered the new amenities. They will eventually be rolled out to international flights on Boeings 777 and 767-300s. Other bed amenities will include a lightweight day blanket, new premium duvet ad pillow and a kit containing brand-name skincare products and “travel necessities. The Consumerist blog says all this "hearken[s] back to the day of luxury carriers like Pan Am and the high-end airlines favored by international business travelers." But the Economist asks the question: do business travellers really care that much about this sort of thing? They point out the main complaint many flyers have about big American carriers is that their service is rotten. “Amenities are an important part of the service experience. But they're not as important as making sure your customers get where they are going on time and happy,” the Economist adds. By David Wilkening

(Source: Travelmole.com)