Travel Industry
Marketing Sheffield and other secondary cities Just before I toddled off to Australia for a couple of weeks in mid-February, I read an interesting interview on Sheffield Blog with Wendy Ulyett, tourism manager for Marketing Sheffield. Among the topics covered were why Sheffield is now being promoted separately from Yorkshire South (and let’s face it, [...]
Continue reading about A destination marketing dilemma: How do you sell a city like Sheffield?
Tomorrow, I am flying to Australia via Taiwan with China Airlines. After booking this, I was prompted to look at what you get when you put “China Airlines” into a Google image search. It is mighty encouraging… But the experience got me thinking. How do other airlines come across in pictures? So I put their [...]
Much ado about Naples On Wednesday morning, I was putting together an article about York. I’d just written that Laterooms.com is a decent place to look for deals on B&Bs when Rotterdam-based travel writer Shaney Hudson said something rather interesting on Twitter. Shaney had spotted a sizable chunk of her article on Naples quoted in [...]
Continue reading about A dubious approach to website content
Top B&B? Last weekend, I was up in York researching a city guide. And for a place with so many accommodation options, surprisingly few of them have a degree of flair that makes them stand out from the crowd. But on my trawl around the B&Bs, I finally found one that looked great. It was [...]
Athens misgivings I’ve recently got back from Athens, a city with the sort of historic pedigree that most destinations would kill for. And, given that I’m a sucker for history, I should have lapped it up gleefully. But something wasn’t quite right. Take away the fact that Athens is a dirty and rather ugly city, [...]
Continue reading about How to preserve historic buildings: Protect or rebuild?
London visit Over the New Year I was down in London researching a few stories that shall no doubt send readers over the world into uncontrolled rapture in the coming months. I stayed at the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch and I wasn’t overly impressed with it. Out of curiosity, I thought I’d have a [...]
Continue reading about The great hotel room lottery: Renovations and reservations
You know those rubbish episodes of The Simpsons where they can’t be bothered to write anything new, and just string a few highlight clips together? Well, this is the Grumpy Traveller equivalent. I’m going into hiding until the New Year – but here are a few of my favourite 2010 posts that you may have [...]
British Airways fuel surcharge increase British Airways has announced that it is going to put up the fuel surcharge by £10 for each leg of a long haul flight. This takes the fuel surcharge up to a total of £… Actually, you know what? I couldn’t care less what the fuel surcharge is. For airlines, [...]
Being connected Last week, I ranted about one of the topics that frequently makes me angry – the appalling public transport connections to UK airports. As part of it, I said Heathrow airport shouldn’t be the end of the line – it should be between somewhere and somewhere else. Obviously, people will go there anyway [...]
The following is a vague approximation of what I said when I was asked to speak at Travel Blog Camp 2010, to a room full of bloggers, journalists, editors, PRs and travel company owners. At least I think it’s what I said – what actually came out of my mouth may have been a stream-of [...]
Continue reading about What blogging and tweeting has done for me