What’s the longest you’ve been delayed at an airport? Long enough to write a book? That’s the premise of Dear American Airlines, the debut novel of Jonathan Miles, reviewed in The New York Times by Richard Russo – though I’ve just realised you can only read that if you’re a registered user of the NY […]

Leo Hickman’s The Final Call, which I have mentioned before, is now out in a new paperback edition. Well worth a look if you have any interest at all in what can be done to make tourism a positive force rather than the “pernicious disease” Hickman finds it to be in so many places. Have […]

Before I went to Cuba, everyone told me I was lucky to be getting in while Castro was still alive and before everything changed. That was in 1996.  He’s not dead yet and no one’s sure whether we’re about to see a historic change or just a handover. Now’s the time to go, all the […]

There are passengers who always manage to stretch their legs or get to the loo just before the captain says “We’re in for a spot of turbulence — please fasten your seatbelts.” How do they know it’s coming?
  If they’re flying with United Airlines, they’re probably tuning into Channel 9. According to a story in […]

The train, thanks to Eurostar, may be the transport of the moment in Europe, but in the United States the most surprising story is the return of the inter-city bus. For the first time in 40 years, bus services have been growing in both the east and west, according to a study by the School […]

Surely one of the first lessons an airline pilot learns is never to leave the passengers in any doubt about their safety. The pilot of the GB Airways flight I caught yesterday from Tenerife to London had clearly forgotten it. The flight had been due to leave at 1950 and was taxiing when we were […]

The Thanksgiving holiday is approaching, the skies above the United States will be crowded with planes, and the government has been looking for ways to ease congestion, according to today’s New York Times. Its answer: to let passenger aircraft use flight paths “through areas off the Atlantic coast where the Air National Guard and the […]

It’s suddenly fashionable to be an anorak, to be able to reel off how long it takes to get from London to Paris or Brussels by train. But we in the British media – our pages full of the continent-shrinking properties of the Eurostar service from St Pancras – aren’t alone in our obsession.
  El […]

Why can’t it be as easy to buy a holiday online as it is to buy a new printer or a shirt? Why do you always have to start by typing in where you’re going and when and then wade through a lot of options you’re not interested in or can’t afford?
  It’s a question […]

Airlines may now be quoting taxes, fees and charges as part of the fare, but they’re still being less than frank about other extras.
Today’s Daily Telegraph has a full-page ad in which Flybe, in a huge headline figure, offers fares “from 19.99 one way”. The small print at the foot of the page says the […]