501 Places

“Social media is revolutionising our world. It is changing the way we interact with others, and the way in which companies and individuals do business.” “The old ways are dead; long live Twitter and Facebook.” Presumably this brave new world comes with its own set of new rules. In search of these new commandments I [...]

I view tipping with a sense of distaste and see it as a sad legacy of a class system that should have died out decades ago. In a nutshell I don’t see why service staff aren’t paid a decent salary so they don’t have to beg to customers in order to make up for their [...]

Nowadays I am obsessed with travelling light, and feel like a complete failure if the scales at the check-in desk exceed the 10kg mark (we managed 19.8kg between two of us for our month in Asia, which I thought was just about passable). But it wasn’t always so, and when I first started travelling in [...]

Today we took a walk along the Thames from Blackfriars Bridge to Greenwich. The route is around 7 miles long and winds its way through the heart of London’s historic docklands. The purpose of our trek? To visit the new Solar Season at the Greenwich Observatory. It’s well worth a visit if you have an [...]

Seeing the aurora borealis for the first time is one of my most vivid memories. We were staying in the Shetland Islands, around 100 miles north of the Scottish mainland, and had returned to our cottage after dinner. It was just before midnight, and being early April it was still bitterly cold when the wind [...]

75% of travellers take into account the reviews and comments of blogs and review sites before deciding on their holiday destination. That was one of the main findings of the GfK Ascent survey that was presented at last week’s CIMTIG Travel Vision 2010 event. Should that be a surprise? I suspect for those of us [...]