If you’re wondering why the post rate has slowed a little this past week, it’s because I’ve been suffering from ‘flu. It even had me confined to bed one day, missing a day of work due to illness for only the second time in about 15 years! I’m pleased to say, though, that I’m not past the worse of it, and so you can expect normal service to resume as soon as I have caught up on a few work issues. Thanks for your patience.
Here are the details of a request for a quote a customer sent to a travel agent yesterday.
Someone said the great thing about travel is the journey, not the destination. At Viator we take issue with that for about 5,000 different reasons — as in the 5,000 tours and things to do you can book in hundreds of destinations worldwide at viator.com. For us travel is all about the destination, and certainly not about the journey.
But that’s not to say we don’t think getting there can be a lot of fun. With that in mind I accepted an invitation to fly with our new partner, SilverJet, who operate one of the new all-business-class services between London and New York. OK, it wasn’t a difficult decision, given I had to fly from London back to San Francisco anyway. Why not see what all the fuss is about, and pick up a commuter flight from NYC to SF the next day?
Here’s a press release that I thought was worth sharing. I don’t know anything about this company, Harlem Spirituals, but I do know that too few people understand Harlem. People all over the world are scared of Harlem - I know a restaurant in Jinju (a small city in South Korea) where on the wall in completely broken English they have a few lines of text about a woman who had never cried but broke down in tears the first time she saw Harlem.
I’m back here in Manila. Anyway the Dinagyang Festival 2008 in Iloilo City Philippines was a huge success. Thousands of locals, and foreign tourists flocked to Iloilo to witness the annual celebration of the Dinagyang Festival.
Anyway, here’s the list of winners of yesterday’s competition:
GRAND CHAMPION: Tribu Paghidaet
Bali needs tourist guides who speak Russian fluently as more and more Russians are visiting Indonesia`s most famous tourist island, an official said.
Out of the 7,039 certified tourist guides available on Bali Island, only 41 speak Russian, Made Sukadana, chairman of the Indonesian Tourist Guide Association (HPI), said here on Monday.
Of the total number of tourist guides, around 2,586 speak English and 2,160 Japanese, he said.
Bali`s tourism office had recorded the arrival of 31,267 Russians visited at the Island in the January-November period in 2007, an increase of 64.5 percent from 19,000 in the same period in 2006.
A total of around 1.5 million foreign tourists visited Bali last year with the number of Japanese topping the list followed by Australians and Taiwanese while the Russians came in 13th place.
Bali was visited by 327,301 Japanese tourists in the January-November period in 2007, an increase of 40 percent from 233,588 in the same period in 2006.
The number of Australian tourists visiting Bali last year was 182,301, up by 54 percent from 117,969 in the previous year.
Bali received 132,165 Taiwanese tourists last year, a slight decrease from 132,171 in 2006.
Last year, Bali saw a total of 1.5 foreign tourist arrivals, the highest figure in the past 10 years.
