501 Places

It was a story that led me to Aldeburgh in the first place. I recently read Scapegallows by Carol Birch, a book that follows the life of Margaret Catchpole, a feisty young lady who was twice sentenced to hang and eventually shipped off to Australia. Her true-life account is told in the context of the […]

I read a recent article written by a hotel receptionist (I’ve searched through my archives to try and find a link, with no success) that had me banging my head on the desk in frustration (metaphorically, of course). The author was scathing about the inventor of rolling luggage (suitcases with wheels), saying that they had […]

Tourism officials go to great lengths to promote how friendly their country is to foreign visitors and with good reason: ask someone who has just come back from a holiday to describe their experience and it’s likely that the hospitality they received (or lack of it) will be one of the first things mentioned. It’s […]

  People travel thousands of miles to see the world’s top tourist attractions. When they arrive they are hardly likely to be deterred by an overpriced entrance ticket. With this in mind, is it reasonable for tourism chiefs to charge any amount they can get away with, or is there any benefit in providing a […]

I was in London on Sunday as part of a family day out to experience the Jubilee celebrations. We didn’t see much of the pageant and may have got a brief glimpse of the Queen (it could have been Camilla, we were a long way away) but at the end of the day our troupe […]

Stay-cation, day-cation, car-cation – when will we see the end of the urge to create these awful PR buzz words, created in an attempt to make the mundane seem a little more exciting? Given that it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see this ridiculous trend finish anytime soon, I thought I’d take a sneaky look at […]

Visit England launched their new promotional campaign ‘Holidays at home are great’ last week amid a flurry of PR activity. Jeremy Hunt, the government minister with the bloated title of Secretary of State for Culture Media, Sport and the Olympics, kicked off the £5m initiative and declared it the biggest ever domestic tourism campaign. The […]

The pattern has been nothing if not consistent in the last few decades. Cities that spent millions (more recently billions) in their preparations to hold the Olympic Games found to their cost that their estimates of a tourism bonanza proved way off the mark. Thousands of hotel rooms remained unoccupied while those who did come […]

Over the weekend we had the chance to explore two cities in the south east of England that have a fair amount in common. Both are a short train ride from London; both have enough olde worlde buildings to be regularly used as a filming location for period dramas; and of particular relevance to this […]

I’m currently arranging a new mobile phone contract. In common with most people I have very low expectations of the customer service I’m likely to receive. This is borne out of years of bitter experience. While the staff often appear incapable of connecting my phone to a functioning network at the price I signed up […]