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May Special

Wait till you see what we’re sending out next

Next week Cultural Travels will e-mail a “Specials Newsletter” to all our travelers and travel agents. The newsletter will publish the trip calendars and specials of those tour operators who’ve taken advantage of our standing offer to list those items for free on the Cultural Travels web site. The newsletter, which we intend to make a regular part of our e-commerce promotions, will keep travelers and agents current on the latest tour offerings and help them as they make decisions or recommendations. To be included, list your Trip Calendar and Specials today.

Attack of the killer bureaucrats!                                               

Once again the Europeans have shown us how not to run an economy. The European Union (EU) recently announced that it will begin taxing music, software and videos sold over the Internet. The “reasoning” behind the move? It seems that Europeans often find goods online that are priced lower than what they can find in their own countries. The EU figures that by taxing foreign merchants’ sales, it will somehow improve the competitiveness of European merchants. Hell will freeze over before it would occur to the bureaucratic drones who now run Europe that a better solution might be to tax their own businesses less so that they could be more competitive. These are the same folks who’ve saddled Europe with chronically high unemployment, a low growth rate and serious productivity problems. Why are we harping on this? Because there are bureaucrats in the U.S. and Canada who are also drooling over the possibility of turning the Internet into a cash cow for their pork barrel follies.

.. . .And kudos to the good bureaucrats

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a software company is working with Orbitz on a way that will enable travel agents to access Orbitz’s huge inventory of special web-only airline fares that agents just can’t match. Is this a case of Orbitz suddenly seeing the light about the value of travel agents? Nah. What it’s really a case of is somebody in the Federal Government pointing out that Orbitz walks, talks and smells like a potential anti-trust case. Orbitz is owned jointly by American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and United airlines, and the Feds may think they’re looking at a classic case of colluding to squeeze out smaller competitors. We’re happy to sneer at bureaucrats when they do doofus things (see “Attack of the Killer Bureaucrats” above). We’re also happy to point out the obvious: thank God for the Feds when it comes to reining in companies who pretend their intent is one thing when it’s actually something else.

We’re back from Japan and like what we’ve seen

Walk into a Japanese newsstand and you’ll see dozens of publications aimed at travel – far more than you’d see at a well-stocked American newsstand. It makes sense: Japan is still the world’s second largest economy (almost $5 trillion) and its 140 million people live in cramped quarters on an island group the size of Montana. Our research shows they are a huge travel market: More than 16 million Japanese travel abroad each year, spending almost $1,800 per capita – a $29.4 billion market. As sophisticated as they are, the Japanese make all travel arrangements through local agents. While using an agent can be desirable, the agent must have options. Currently, all Japanese agents are supplied by a few mega-agencies. They don’t know that they can arrange U.S. and other overseas trips independent of these monopolies. That’s why we recently visited Japan and are now working on a way to bring the Japanese market to U.S. tour hosts. Watch this space for further developments.

“There I was, dropping over Niagara Falls in a Yugo. . .”

Now that’s the kind of opening line we’d like to see more of in our monthly online newsletter, The Cultured Traveler. We know from experience that the best travel stories are first-person stories, and we’d like to publish more of them. If you have a good yarn that you’d like to see online (preferably something that’s already been written), send it to us for consideration. We are gentle editors who try to keep your distinctive voice intact (our biggest concerns are spelling and punctuation) and we always give full credits, including your name, title, company, and link to your CT listing. Please do keep in mind that we don’t pay for tour host or travel agent-submitted pieces, because such articles are equivalent in many ways to free advertising. If you’re interested, submit your query or article to articles@culturaltravels.com

Our summer print newsletter will be out in June—will you be receiving one?

Our quarterly print version of The Cultured Traveler will be going out to travelers, travel agents, Web Page Advertisers and new tour hosts in June. Lead story in the 12-page newsletter will cover “Ten of the World’s Most Moving War Memorials,” a look at monuments to armed struggle that have become beloved or world-renowned because of their design. Among others we’ll look at the Vietnam War Memorial, the great Rodina statue at Volgograd in Russia, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the monument to the child heroes at Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. Behind the scenes, we’ll profile Robert Reynolds of Valour Tours in Sausalito, CA, a WWII vet who has been instrumental in the creation of several notable war memorials and the creation of tours centered on them.