I am in a huge pavilion, a sort of giant tent, and a man up in front of us is speaking about his company called Hitwise. His company provides intelligence to on-line travel agencies about their competitors, they can tell you, for instance, where web surfers went after they left […]
I’m in a room full of bloggers. They all have their laptops open and we are constantly popping over to search engines and sites, sharing opinions and information about the world of travel blogs. It’s a heady time, it’s so much fun to be an established blogger who has a […]
Part of the fun of this conference is the chance to have short meetings with new companies who are entering the on-line travel sphere. I sat with two young guys who have started a new company called TV Trip. It’s a cool concept–they provide a video look at thousands of […]
On the bus over to the Omni, I eavesdropped on a man who spoke enthusiastically about blogs, search engine marketing and the work he does creating blog content. His name was Marty, and he wore Ray Bans over his shaved head. He said as he was leaving the bus that […]
I made my way over to the towering Omni Hotel at Champion’s Gate, on the flat plain that is Orlando FL. Unbeknownst to me I was not staying in this palace, but at the nearby Radisson. I met up with Jim Zhu who I’ve known for some time, as he […]
It’s still exciting, every time I am about to fly. It’s below forty degrees here at Cindy’s but when I deplane in Orlando this afternoon, temps should be much warmer. I am not sure what to expect for the next few days, but my eternal optimism tells me that it […]
This morning I learned about a man on Martha’s Vineyard named Lew French. He is a perfectionist, a tough taskmaster, and a wealthy artist…but he doesn’t do it for the money. He was profiled by the TV show Sunday Morning’s Steve Hartman. French fits stones together in an otherworldly way. […]
It’s been a whirlwind of a few days, it’s nice to be back for just a brief spell at home base. Manhattan was the usual mix of exciting nightlife, people from the past, and potential trips that we’ll be writing about all next year. We were taken to a wonderful […]
Kent and I are ensconced at the Holiday Inn in Manhattan, just about to go meet some fellow travel writers and sample Hungarian wines. Tim Leffel, the owner of Perceptive Travel, extended this invite, and put it succinctly–“Kent, why don’t you join us and sip free wine instead of having […]
We all passed the test. It was an important one, required by state law, and after studying all about food borne illnesses, temperatures for cooking chicken, and the different droppings that pests leave around the kitchen, my staff and I took and passed the Serv-Safe test last night. We celebrated […]
I read with interest on the BBC News a sentence at the very end of an article about Zimbabwe, which was in the news today because they printed $200,000 bills, that buy, well, a sack of sugar. The intriguing part was a note about Grand Inga, where the world’s longest […]
A grey, windy day—a good day to sit in the window of the GoNOMAD Cafe and read the WSJ. Here I found a piece by Roya Hakakian about Iran and the Holocaust. The author has a visit from two young female medical students, and at dinner they tell her that […]