The problem with Venice

We took this picture from the Academia bridge in Venice just a week and half ago. What a Kodak moment. I guess we always figured that the point of visiting Venice was just to be in Venice. Exploring the narrow streets. Getting lost. The very quiet nights. Dodging the pigeons at St. Marks. Venice has always been a very expensive tourist destination. What we weren't quite prepared for during this visit was just how expensive it has become and how tourist unfriendly it really is. Whether it was the assault of local "gypsies" offering to help us carry our luggage over the bridge at the railroad stations, we had visions of chasing them through the streets with our stolen luggage, the mediocre overpriced food at virtually every restaurant we frequented, or the "scam" of charging our credit card for the entire stay at our hotel two weeks prior to our check in date, we came to the conclusion that this very special place has become very tourist unfriendly. The guide books write about the problems of the shrinking Venice population caused by living on water and the expensive cost of transporting everything into the city. It seems that the remaining locals have taken a rather zealous unrepentent aim at the swarms of unsuspecting tourist's pocketbooks. Maybe the economics of the place have something to do with it. During our ten day visit to Italy, visiting very touristy Florence, Lake Como, and Tuscany, we only encountered the scam of converting our credit card charges into dollars on site at a very expensive exchange rate....Venice. Money rule number one. When traveling in Europe only pay with Euros. When traveling in America only pay in dollars. Prego.

Check out our link to Planet Travel's Europe City Tours for more information about traveling to Italy

WUIS Passport Tour to Italy May 2007 Update

Thanks to those who attended our information meeting Wednesday evening. One particpant asked about the hotels we will be staying at during the tour. We will be posting our hotels within the week. Our supplier is currently negotiating with three hotels in Rome. When we hear back from them, we will post more information our our web site. In addition, we have tentative plane schedules that require a rather long first day. The current plane schedule requires us to leave Springfield at 9:00 a.m. with a plane change before we fly to Rome. We have requested a shorter layover and anticipate that we will be leaving Springfield later than 9:00 a.m. on May 16, 2007. More updates shortly. Thank you to all who have booked the trip so far. We have already met half of our group goal. Please don't hesitate to call our office at 877-713-7650 if you have any questions.

link more information about our WUIS Passport Tour to Italy May 2007

WUIS Passport Tour to Italy May 2007

Sometimes time can slip away from us. When last we posted we were headed to Las Vegas and in the midst of planning a group trip with public radio station WUIS to help them with their fall fund raising drive. Mission accomplished. It has been a very busy two months. We are now up and going. Promotion for the trip is underway and and we are planning a two week trip to France and Italy for the last two weeks in October. This trip will help us complete the WUIS group trip details. If you haven't had a chance to check out the WUIS trip, please do so. We spent a significant amount of time planning this trip, doing our best to combine the best of Florence and Rome for the group, while incorporating plenty of free time for each individual member. We are especially proud of our group dinner selections because group dinner on the whole we have found are not the best. Adding the chance to attend the Maggio Musicale Florentino concerts makes this trip a special can't get it anywhere else experience. We have done the hard stuff. You know. The transportation connections, the hotels, the ticket purchases, that can make independent travel a struggle at times. It is a great trip. Hope you can enjoy us.

Check out our link to Planet Travel's Europe City Tours for more information about our WUIS Passport Tours to Italy trip

Why we don't care for these three Las Vegas Resorts

We spend a lot of time recommending Las Vegas resorts to our clients. It seems that "first time visitors" seem to have just two requirements when we ask them where they want to stay at during their next Vegas vacation. It has to meet their budget and it has to be on the strip. After that, it is up to us to make a hotel recommendation. Our clients really have to want to stay at the Stratosphere. Usually those clients have very limited budgets. Not because it is bad place to stay. The rooms are clean. Food is OK. Nothing special though. Gambling above average for the strip. It is just the fact that it is sooooo isolated on the northern end of the strip. Anytime you want to venture anyplace else, you better have a car or hop on the deuce, to get where you want to go. And by the way the surrounding neighborhood is too iffy in our opinion. Especially that across the street hotel from the Stratosphere, name escapes for a moment. Was that gunshots we heard last time we visited the Stratosphere?


And that isolation thing also plays in our recommendation of staying at the Mandalay Bay.
No it wasn't the surely security guard that chased us out of the pool area after hours or the tight, no make that incredibly tight, slot machines at the Mandalay Bay, that soured us on the resort. If you stay at the Mandalay Bay, anytime you want to get anywhere else, be prepared for the long walk through the Luxor and the Excalibur, or the long wait and ride on the free tram to the Excalibur before you get to anywhere else. Why spend the money to stay at Mandalay Bay, when the Bellagio is in the center of everything? Or for that matter Ceasars or Paris or the great pool area at the Flamingo.


And finally the The New Frontier. Destined for the wrecking ball. The New Frontier remains our "number one dumpiest casino on the strip award winner." We stole this one sentence review from the cheapo Las Vegas website. "It's about as ratty as an unwashed prospector." We don't know where the "new" comes from. Nothing new at this casino in many years.

Back to Las Vegas next week. More news to follow.

Crown Princess Accident

A rather neat summary of the Crown Princess listing accident from the Orlando Sentinel including an interactive illustration of what happened. The incident renews a call from various experts for more regulation of the cruise industy. The cruise industry continues to be plagued with various serious incidents including fires, sickness, lost passengers, dead passengers, and apparently a similar "steering problem" on another Princess ship earlier this year. Time to kick in the PR machine. Watch for even more cruise sales as bookings continue to be soft this year. Not entirely the fault of these past incidents.

Find the latest cruise sales from planet travel online

The winds of a recession

We have been crossing our fingers lately at Planet Travel. Bookings are starting to show an uptick from a very slow first quarter. But now the economists are warning about the possiblility of a recession and identify the current economy as being caught in stagflation. Stagflation is that condition of rising inflation and a slowing economy. What does that mean to the travel consumer? Deals. Already we have seen fall and winter sales at rates that are well off this summer's record high prices. The latest visitor counts in Las Vegas are showed a drop in May 2006. Although, the reason given was fewer conventions, we think higher gasoline prices and sky high strip room rates are having more of an effect than they realize. Already August travel bookings are down industry wide. Wait and see. The sales are coming.

link to Planet Travel. Don't forget to check our daily updated list of hot deals

Yet another trip to Las Vegas yields two more tips.

We have just returned from Las Vegas leading a Planet Travel client group of 20 and discovered two additional tips to pass along. How we missed them before we don't know. In hindsight they were as plain as the nose on our faces.

After hiking for seemingly miles to the closest monorail station from the Riviera (didn't know before that Donald Trump was once a minority stockholder of the Riviera that had something to do with his ongoing feud with Steve Wynn) we figured that there had to be a better way. The distance between monorail stations in Las Vegas and the resorts they serve will ultimately be the system's downfall. Not well thought out in hindsight. The speed of the monorail doesn't match the long, long, walks, to the stations. We decided to try the local transit system strip bus: the Deuce. Started in October, 2005, you can ride up and down the strip for 24 hours for just $5.00. The cost of just one ride on the monrail. It is a slow trip any time of the day on the very busy strip. And the wait time between busses can be long. It is still the best way to get up and down the strip or get downtown to check out Fremont street.

Here is a link to the deuce's web site

link to more information about the deuce

Walgreens has the cheapest souvenirs on the strip. What do you want? Ashtrays. T-Shirts. Las Vegas Signs. Retro Vegas pictures and posters. Walgreens has them. Cheaper than anywhere else we could find. The proof is the current fav souvenir a desktop flashing light up replica of the Las Vegas sign found on the far south end of the strip. Walgreens has them for $29.95. Everywhere else we found them the price was as much as ten dollars more. Save money to spend on the new shortened to 95 minutes from the original two hours and 40 minutes version of the Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian. What is with that anyway? I guess in Vegas anything is possible. Especially when you charge $150.00...twice the amount as the West End orignal version charges for the old original longer version.

link to Planet Travel's Las Vegas Connection with great prices to our favorite destination