Interview with Richard Fain, Chairman and CEO, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. By Bill Becken Coming down from a very tough 2012, Richard Fain, Chairman and CEO, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd., still envisions a golden future for cruising. RCCL’s brands together field about 40 ships. Its only larger rival and competitor is Carnival Corp, which fields […]

By Lark Ellen Gould If you haven’t been to South Australia lately, better bring a pair of comfortable shoes and an appetite. The state that is the fourth largest on the continent is also full of amazing arid land formations, precipitous ocean cliffs, wonderful walkable cities and villages, and some of the best wine and […]

  “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” opens wide on December 14. It’s the next in a series of New Line Cinema’s Tolkien-related productions that have come out since 2001 and the first of the Hobbit-specific genre. And it all happens in New Zealand. Peter Jackson’s 70 or so chosen locations for this film spread for […]

By Lark Ellen Gould When it comes to planning a vacation what wields more weight in determining whether customers get what they want: Price or Advice? If you ask travel agents at the Ensemble Travel Group, they will tell you – you guessed it – price may be queen but product and destination knowledge is […]

Change or die. That’s the chorus of an industry spinning out in too much motion. And it was also the wisdom that came out of a sobering talk given to travel agents at ITB Asia last month in Singapore.  Delivering the news was Adrian Caruso, CEO of TAFastrack a digital marketing firm in Australia that […]

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By Lark Ellen Gould Two new studies are predicting rises in hotel and airline rates and a slightly expanded, but notably sluggish, growth in the corporate travel sector. Egencia, a formidable travel management company owned by Expedia, recently unveiled its 2013 Global Corporate Travel Forecast for air fares and hotel rates and found Average Ticket […]

By Lark Ellen Gould Hawaii is on a high these days with hotels reporting healthy occupancy rates, a destination-branded airline touting double-digit growth numbers and visitor counts that are making life look like its 2006 all over again. Tourism spending over the first nine months of the year rose 20% from the previous year to […]

By Lark Ellen Gould Anyone who has traveled to Hawaii or through the Pacific with an eye on where to stay has come across the now ubiquitous brand of Outrigger Hotels and Resorts. The company, which is nearly synonymous with Waikiki, got its start in 1947 when Roy and Estelle Kelley opened their first hotel, The […]

  Getting away to the near bottom of the world is not easy. But when you get there you want the journey to be worth it. Deep in the alpine mists of Patagonia, Chile’s gateway to the bottom of the world, Dos Lagos, an unexpected slice of lodging paradise in the middle of nature’s extreme […]