Travel Industry Archive

The Venetian Macao Resort Hotel was supposed to be a 3,000-suite mega-resort, a kind of Disneyland copy of Venice, with casinos and shopping for an upscale Asian market. But now Las Vegas Sands Corp. is $10 billion in debt and sliding, its projects postponed or canceled just as the economy takes a swandive. A look at its quarterly report doesn’t hold much back. So far, on the Cotai...

More...

A week ago I wrote about Obama Tourism, but the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau now has a part of its site dedicated to “Barack Obama’s Hawaii.”  The Web site points out where he went to high school, where he body-surfed, that national cemetery where his grandfather was buried and where he played golf.  It also has an interview with Obama by Pico Iyer and other...

More...

Several airlines, including Delta Air Lines, canceled flights to Mumbai in the aftermath of terrorist attacks targeting Western tourists that began on Wednesday. Other airlines like Lufthansa and Air France-KLM also canceled scheduled flights. However, it appears that as of Friday afternoon, all airlines are resuming international flights, although cargo shipments may still be delayed....

More...

When Thanksgiving rolls around and sources go on vacation, journalists find that stories often dry up. Hence, we get a feature story on something that’s timely, namely the AAA press release on holiday travel. The agency, which often regionalizes reports, is a godsend to reporters having to work the few days before Thanksgiving.   So, this year we got ”Recession Keeps More...

More...

State Department issues travel alert for Mumbai after more than 140 killed – With more than 140 dead and 325 injured in terrorist attacks in the past two days, the U.S. State Department issued a travel alert for Americans traveling or already in India, asking them to defer travel a few days or “maintain a high level of vigilance.” The terrorist attacks targeted areas around...

More...

Yesterday, I wrote about the efforts in Branson to build the first commercial airport in the US that won’t take government money. This is an exciting prospect, because it could end up being an alternative model for airport development going forward. We’ll need to see how things go when this opens, but foregoing government money does allow for a lot of creative moves. When airports...

More...

Three very different metros claimed the country’s top spots in hotel occupancy and room revenue increases this year, according to data from Smith Travel Research. Houston, New Orleans and San Francisco posted the heartiest year-over-year occupancy (i.e. the only one in the Top 25 markets with a rise in numbers) and room revenue performance, while other cities, such as Phoenix, Boston,...

More...

Bangkok’s second airport was closed Wednesday when protestors filled the terminal, leaving it completely cut off to air travel and stranding thousands of tourists. On Tuesday, protesters stormed Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok’s international airport, followed by a bomb blast that hurt two people before officials shut down the airport.  On Wednesday, yellow-shirted protestors...

More...

The airport business is an interesting one in the US in that it’s generally considered a public utility. Cities or airport authorities tend to run most airports, and all of them take federal funds. Now, for the first time in the US, an airport is being built for commercial service completely via private funding. I had the chance to sit down with the folks building the Branson Airport...

More...

I’ve been getting updates over the last couple days from Travelocity’s Window Seat blog, and it appears that flying has been a pretty easy event for this season’s holiday travel so far. Part of it is that there are fewer airplanes in the air and part of it is probably that the weather was relatively calm, but don’t worry, this isn’t becoming a consumer blog....

More...