Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

One of the regular nightmares that seems to get worse every year is the business of getting away for the bank holiday weekends.

We all know that the roads will be full, the airports chaotic and the ferry queue backed up yet for just about every bank holiday weekend you see the queues everywhere. From the other side of the fence it’s just as bad: we could do with another floor added on to the building at peak periods yet the bookings drop away just as quickly right after the bank holiday and we’re rattling round a big building.

Although you’d think that people would be glad to get a place to stay at such times, in fact we usually get an equally large jump in no-shows. Just this weekend we had a family who’d booked almost half the building between them yet neither cancelled nor turned up. Had they cancelled, we’d have filled the rooms easily enough yet they didn’t so we had to keep the rooms available for them.

One thing to watch in these days where almost all reservations are guaranteed by a credit card is that if you don’t cancel, you’ll get charged at least for the first night and increasingly often for your entire stay.

Whilst we all love our vacation time, we all assume that places that thrive on tourist business will be open during the holidays.

That’s not always the case in France where many attractions are closed today because it’s Labour Day (May 1st). Although many people will be eating out today, a number of restaurants choose this time of year to close thus losing considerable business of course.

Even when they’re not on holiday many restaurants stick to the 12 to 2pm lunchtime and we know of one local touristy village which gets tour buses every day from 9am to 7pm yet the restaurant only serves food from 12 to 1.30pm.

Myrtle Beach resort in South Carolina isn’t as well known as some other resorts nearby but don’t let that put you off as it has all the facilities on offer that you could want.

In addition to a wide range of hotel choices and, of course, beach activities there are lots of non-beach based activities in the area too including Myrtle Beach golf, numerous parks, museums and nightlife. This is all in a very compact area so you won’t end up spending hours in the car to get around as you do in some beach resorts which claim to have “everything”: they may well do but usually they’re so spread out that you’re in a completely different resort by the time you get around them all.

Clearly since it’s a beach resort you’re going to get aquariums, water parks and the like but you also get a good selection of non-water based attractions including the Hopsawee Plantation and the Childrens’ Museum. There’s a surprisingly wide range of shows on offer too of which I quite fancy Medieval Times but there are lots of others to cater for all tastes.

If you’re looking for somewhere on the coast but with a good selection of activities outside the beach area then a  Myrtle Beach vacation seems like a good choice.

When it’s a clear plastic bag that’s had a knot tied in it and doesn’t have a ziploc closing mechanism.

That’s the latest nonsense to come from my travels through airport security and one that was particularly crazy. The security staff focused all their attention on that “deficiency” in my packing and managed to miss four separate items that they should have looked at including one that they very definitely should have taken off me.

So what did they miss this time around?

1. A six inch steel pin. That’s definitely on their checklist of items that aren’t allowed through security yet they missed it entirely which is worrying.
2. A rather heavy iced cake. Eh? Well, considering that it was in a sealed transparent plastic container and the icing has the same look and consistency of plastic explosive they should at the very least have rescanned it with the box open.
3. The luggage scales. These look very suspicious on the scanner thanks to the spring mechanism yet they missed them entirely.
4. The resealable plastic bottles in the above plastic bag. No tests were done of the content and they should have been.

At the moment it seems that rather than being aimed at detecting potential terrorists, the security checks are there merely to annoy honest travellers.

Over the next few days it’s going to be pretty hectic here as the Spanish are coming, as usual for their pre-Easter break.

Also, as usual, they wait ’til the last minute to book. Just a few weeks ago, we had nobody down for the next few days yet as of tomorrow we’re pretty much full until Monday and everyone is from Spain.

The last minute business seems to be getting worse each year as we had several days worth of bookings arriving this morning including the first double booking for the year. The last minute aspect is something that none of the booking systems are really geared up for in that it can be several hours between the guest booking and the system notifying us of that booking which, of course, is plenty of time for a competing reservation system to slip in another booking for the same dates.