The Vegans are coming — live long and prosper!

I LOVE my food! I love eating out. I love watching cookery programmes and browsing through cookery books. Indeed, I don’t think there is a world cuisine that I don’t enjoy. A lot of those cuisines are based around the use of meats or fish of some kind and whilst I am a life-long, card-carrying member of the carnivore society, the older I get, the more I’m beginning to come around to the questionable morality

The reasons why we travel and the criteria by which we choose our destinations

People travel for all sorts of reasons. For some, travel is the antidote to the way they live the rest of the year. It provides excitement, change, challenge, relaxation, new experiences. People travel to recharge their batteries and get a bit of sun — a high priority indeed, when you come from someplace like Ireland — ‘the land of perpetual autumn’, as I often describe it! (more…)

How travel decisions can sometimes be based on incomplete information

Trip Advisor is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. The global review site started out life above a Pizza shop called Kosta's in Needham, Massachusetts in February, 2000. It is a great site without question and I must admit that I have started contributing to it in recent times as I realised, belatedly, that I had a lot to contribute given the amount of travelling I do (and have done). What prompted me to write

How good is your geographic knowledge?

I recently retuned from an enchanting city less than two hours flying time from Dublin which is served by direct flights three times a week by a major international carrier. The city is not large by international standards — being somewhat smaller than Belfast but almost twice that of the Province's capital when you take its greater metropolitan area into consideration. It is located approximately 15 miles inland on a river and yet will play

In praise of the lowly travel agent …

When your mind turns to the question of where you're going to go on your next holiday, what are your options? In the good old days (that I'm old enough to still remember) the answer was simple. You just visited your local travel agent as he (or more usually she) had access to the information that you did not. Nowadays, it's gotten a lot more complicated as there are any number of sources and resources

The art of getting a quote that is both competitive in price and relevant to your needs starts with gathering all the right information about what you want to do (or think you want to do!).