501 Places

Last night saw the latest event held by CIMTIG in London. The debate was centred around the subject of customer loyalty in the travel industry and how travel companies can create loyaly to their brands. Four speakers (Francesca Ecsery from Cheapflights UK, Tom Marchant from Black Tomato, Steven Georgiadis from SAS and Crispin Westhead from [...]

Looking out over the mass of tiled roofs from the famous city walls it’s hard to believe the traumas that the city of Dubrovnik and its residents has been through in the last 20 years. The near perfect uniformity of the earthy red colour hints at a world recently restored, yet the evidence of a [...]

The first thing that most visitors to Albania will notice is that little has been done to make the place look nice. While further up the Adriatic coast the Ottoman treasures in former Yugoslavia have been carefully and expensively restored, this has not happened in Albania. Apart from the dramatic rainbow coloured transformation of some [...]

Montenegro is one of those places that rarely makes the news. Even in the Yugoslav war it remained largely unaffected, siding firmly with the Serbs before quietly voting for independence in 2006 for the first time in almost a century. The James Bond film ‘Casino Royale’ was supposed to be set here; although it is [...]

This colourful topic arose as an after-dinner conversation on our holiday with fellow travellers and was admittedly fuelled by a drink or two along the way. I thought it worth sharing here purely as entertainment, and certainly not to provide anyone with ideas of how to mysteriously dispose of the love of their life. So [...]

If I could share one piece of advice with anyone travelling to the Balkans it would be this: whenever you find yourself in a town packed with partying Serbs and someone tells you it might get noisy, you should listen. We didn’t take the warning we received too seriously and the resulting experience taught us [...]

Many folks out there are championing the cause of slow travel. Why rush they say? Take your time, let yourself immerse in the feel of a place, in its culture. It’s a sensible and persuasive argument, but I have a confession to make. After our recent trip to the Balkans I have been reminded of [...]

Of all the places we were due to visit on our trip to the Balkans, I was most excited at the prospect of finally visiting Sarajevo. Famous for the events that triggered the start of the First World War, for Torvill and Dean (especially in my home city of Nottingham) and for the horrific siege [...]

I just can’t do it. It’s 8am on a Sunday morning and I’m standing on a pavement in Tallinn. I can see half a mile of empty road stretching into the distance. Yet I’m supposed to wait; wait for the green man to let me know I can safely cross the 5 metres of road [...]

At first glance the cemetery in Mostar looked like any other. Nestled alongside a mosque and on the main road heading out of town, this quiet corner of the old city would be unremarkable if I hadn’t looked a little closer. As I started to wander among these tall white stones the enormity of the [...]