Travelblather

You have to hand it to them. The guys in the PR department
at Eastbourne Borough Council must be brave optimists or else have a refined
sense of the ironic.

I just got a press release from them titled Eastbourne
Extreme.

"Eastbourne Extreme returns to Eastbourne seafront with a
vengeance from 19-20 July 2008. Boasting an Animal Relentless Bike Tour, Extreme
will also welcome the return of last year’s exciting Thundercat Power Boats
with a Formula One style race causing a splash in Eastbourne’s seas..."

There's a special website and everything!

Yes folks, this is the seaside resort on the south coast of
England known to most as a great place for retirees to sit on the prom and play
bowls. Census figures from 2001 show that 1 in 8 of the residents of East
Sussex where Eastbourne is situated is over 75 – a higher concentration than
anywhere else in the UK… with 'particularly high proportions of elderly
residents in Eastbourne and Rother'.

Bring on the jet-powered wheelchairs!

Don't get me wrong. Eastbourne is an attractive seaside
resort with traditional appeal – quintessential England. And bringing exciting stuff
to the resort like powerboat races and kitesurfing isn't such a bad idea. But why
the ridiculous attempt to brand it Extreme Eastbourne? It's so out of kilter
with most people's perception of the place! 

But hey, it caught my attention and I'm writing about it… so
maybe their PR department isn't so dumb? (But then….)

(I borrowed this pic from local writer Keith who attempts to portray the place in a slightly more realistic light.)

This is a grumble... put here due to frustration. I've recently been 'upgraded' to the new compose editor on Typepad which offers lots of extra whistles and bells. All very nice. Except for me anyway the whole thing runs incredibly slowly. It's so bad I've ended up composing my posts in Word and then pasting them into the editor screen. Anyone else suffering the same way?? How about a refund for this month's subscription guys? Betas are fine if you're not paying for them... but I'm feeling a tad short-changed at the moment.

Hardly a week goes by without some announcement about extra
frills in Business and First class: new ultra comfy flatbeds, awesome cuisine,
or for A380 flyers a complete suite. But what about the majority of flyers?
Those in the back of the plane? I flew transatlantic with KLM on one of their
old 747 fleet to Mexico City recently and was absolutely amazed. No seatback
TV!? Just clonky old TV screens suspended from the aisle ceilings which you could
hardly see if the window blinds were open. I guess it costs a lot of money to
retro-fit an old plane like that, but I've got so used to having 40 channels to
choose from even in economy I didn't even have a book with me. That 10 hour
flight seemed to last forever!

Mark Frary writing in the Times has posted an interesting list of his top five inflight innovations. One that really shows genuine creative
thought is in economy class too. It's Delta's new cozy suite seats which are
set out on a slightly diagonal row configuration and feature a much higher and
wide head rest with a side panel to rest your head whilst sleeping. It looks
like a great idea, though I wonder if it will make the cabin feel even more
confined. Unfortunately paying customers won't actually see them in use 'til
2010.

Delta's new cozy suite seat prototype

Design writer Allison Arieff writing in her blog for the New York Times
also picked up on the cozy suite, but rightly takes issue with the
airlines for showing little interest in design innovations in economy
class. It would be nice to see more creative thought going into making economy class a more pleasant place to be in - particularly on long haul flights. Airlines seem to forget that many of today's Economy Class flyers are the Business Class flyers of the future.

 Amusing report in the Independent today. A British holidaymaker, David Barnish, was recently awarded £750 in compensation
after suing his travel company over a holiday at a resort filled with
Germans. He complained of sun chairs being claimed at a record rate, of
German-language-only programmes on the hotel's television sets and of
personnel at the luxury Grecotel Park Hotel on the Greek island of Kos
only speaking German.

Bild the German tabloid newspaper has apparently hit-back with a list of the top six places to avoid on holiday if you want to steer clear of Brits.
1) The Bay of Palma, in Majorca
2) San Antonio, in Ibiza
3) Playa de las
Americas, in Tenerife
4) Ayia Napa, in
Cyprus
5) Faliraki, on the Greek island of Rhodes
6) Malia in Crete

I tried to find the article on Bild on-line but there was unfortunately no sign of it.

All round web-guru Dave Sifry has just launched a new beta travel guide site called Offbeatguides.com There's more info at TechCrunch too. Unfortunately you can't see the content unless you have a special invitation code at the moment which is a bit disappointing. Soon as I have one, I'll comment in more detail.

The basic premise is personalised on-demand printed travel
guides. So you compile only the pages/chapters you want and it's printed for
you and mailed to you for 25 US dollars.

I have no doubt that the technology will work – this is the
way guidebooks will go. It's all about personalisation. And like Dave I also
think that we will still want a tangible book rather than a PDF file for a
handheld device. Something as a souvenir, something to scribble notes in… so
much nicer than a faceless file on a computer.

Where I still struggle to agree though is in the content
itself. Dave describes how he used to get really frustrated culling content
from all over the place on-line and compiling a file of stuff that he printed
out to take with him. So this technology does that job for you with a clever
search engine that he has developed. But how do you verify the accuracy of the
content in the first place? The web is full of stuff that's out of date and
inaccurate. Binding it all up in a nice book might make it feel like a proper
guide book… but is it? Can you trust it?

Dave does say that he is doing deals with 'trusted
content providers'. I wonder what impact that will have on the economics. I
can't imagine he will be able to print a personalised guide for 25 bucks if the
content has been licenced. It will be interesting to see.