AVENA TRAVEL

I have several times written about an international organization called ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking in Travel), which ccombats the quite considerable number of organizations that promote tours to areas of widespread child prostitution. At the New York Times Travel Show a week ago, I again met Carol Smolenski, Executive Director of that organization, who later wrote me about the refusal of the U.S. travel industry to sign on to a Code of Conduct for dealing with the problem. In the hope that this inertia may be overcome, I am reprinting an e-mail from her that deals with the campaign:

One thing we didn't talk about last year was the Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism. It is a voluntary Code that companies in the travel industry can adopt so that they are not involuntarily facilitating child sex tourism (www.thecode.org). It has been signed by almost 1,000 companies around the world, but only 4 in the United States: Carlson Companies, ElaBrasil, Amazon Tours, and ASTA. Unfortunately, unlike in the rest of the world, US companies are extremely reluctant to take a stand.

We continue to try to get U.S. companies to adopt the Code of Conduct. Even if they are not willing to sign the Code, we ask that they at least begin to adopt policies that protect children and to train their staff. We have had some success recently with Choice Hotels. After a grassroots...

When Ed Kushins agreed three years ago to have his company, HomeExchange.com (www.homeexchange.com), featured in the movie The Holiday, he didn't fully forsee the transformation which that lucky break would bring about in his life. A big movie hit, that featured Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz exchanging homes and finding love as a result, the film brought an avalanche of new members to HomeExchange.com, making it undoubtedly the single largest company in the field today.

As a result of the film, thew website now has more than 32,000 home exchange listings (35% in the U.S., the remainder around the world), and continues to receive between 400 and 500 new listings each week.

Home exchanges (which can also be apartment exchanges) have now become mainstream, according to Kushins (whom Pauline and I interviewed on our radio show this past weekend). Whereas once people would inquire anxiously about the safety of a home exchange, they now focus instead on the mechanics of the exchange, having concluded without any problem that the procedure is quite acceptably safe. According to Kushins, in 18 years of arranging home exchanges he has never once received a report of thefts or malicious damage. The fact that someone has negligently knocked over a piece of bric-a-brac is the usual worst report.

We asked Kushins to name the chief factors that had brought about this enormous surge in the amount of home exchanging for vacation purposes. He of course...

Four major hotel discounters and deal-finders are enjoying record use, all because of a substantial drop in both individual and group bookings at America's hotels.

By way of background: Few industries are suffering more from the current economic slowdown. Their occupancies badly down, many U.S. hotels have turned to the most desperate and therefore most imaginative discounts ever for luring travelers into their rooms. Several have even claimed that if you pay their normal room rates, you will receive the right "to eat all you want" throughout the day, free of charge, at their in-hotel restaurants and cafes.

These colorful offers are the ammunition for a price war recently launched by the several websites -- Deal Base (www.dealbase.com), getaroom (www.getaroom.com), HotelsCombined.com (www.hotelscombined.com), and Priceline (www.priceline.com) -- that promote themselves as able to save you big bucks on accommodations in key American cities. The CEO of one of them, a certain Sam Shank of Deal Base, appeared on yesterday's Travel Show presented by my daughter and myself, eagerly describing all the colorful ways in which travelers can slash their hotel expenses by making use of his popular site. His was a dramatic presentation of a hotel industry in bad trouble.

Just as startling was the insertion of a big, expensive advertisement in yesterday's travel section of the New York Times by getaroom, listing sample, desperation hotel room rates of $23 in Las Vegas, $58 in Chicago, $64...

You've heard about Patients Beyond Borders by Josef Woodman. That's a serious and substantial book introducing the field of medical tourism, and it has now erupted into several different national versions and second editions. Reflecting what is obviously a growing public interest in the subject (the increasing cost of health insurance guarantees an audience), an interesting website -- www.visitandcare.com -- has also joined the fray. It appears to work a lot like an aggregator of potential foreign health care institutions  -- well, not entirely like an aggregator. I believe most practices pay to be listed. But it does offer one-stop comparison shopping to find everything from necessary dentistry to cosmetic surgery to fertility treatments, orthopedic surgery, and laser eye surgery, among other procedures in countries ranging from Central America to Europe (mostly Eastern and Central European countries, but also the U.K.) to Asia, India, and the Middle East.

I haven't researched its bona fides or BBB standing (though it does list several accreditations on its site), but perhaps it's worth looking into.

In public, officials of Royal Caribbean Cruises will claim that their new, 6,000-passenger Oasis of the Seas is so very desirable that it can command a high premium of price. In an article appearing on WSJ.com, Royal Caribbean's chairman, Richard Fain, is quoted as saying that "We thought people would like it, and if they liked it they would pay more." A one-week Oasis trip, says the Journal, "costs about $1,458 for an inside cabin and $3,200 for a two-story 'loft suite' facing the ocean".

But guess what? About two weeks ago, I reported that Online Vacation Center was already discounting sailings of the Oasis in 2011 down to under $800 per person. And now -- hold your hats! -- the cruise section of Southwest Airline's website is offering a price of $899 per person for Oasis' sailings this year, on the departures of May 1, 15 and 29. That's in the year 2010.

It's interesting to speculate how and why the marketing section of Royal Caribbean felt that by confining discount activity to an unusual location -- that of a cut-rate airline -- the overall image of Oasis of the Seas would not be affected. Not only does Southwest Airlines offer that low price of $899 for this coming May, it also offers the sailings of March 13, 20, 27, April 3 and April 10, 2010 -- that's this year, believe it or not -- for only $949 per person. So...

"Think Turkey." That's the novel message of a new, Turkey-specific edition of Patients Beyond Borders, the book that has brought a great deal of attention to the possibility of seeking low-cost medical treatments in foreign countries. Up until now, most discussion of medical tourism has focused on Mexico, Central America, Shanghai and Thailand, and the only European country to receive substantial discussion has been Hungary for its famed, low-cost dental facilities.

Suddenly, Turkey is sponsoring seminars, congresses and press conferences dealing with its internationally accredited hospitals, and is supplying official, government support and endorsement to the Turkey edition of Patients Beyond Borders by Josef Woodman. According to Turkey's Ministry of Health and to constant reiteration within the book's pages, Turkey has more JCI-accredited hospitals (Joint Commission International is the organization that grants accreditation to all hospitals) than any other country. That assertion is also bolstered by numerous photographs of what appear to be ultra-modern hospitals equipped with the most up-to-date facilities and devices.

According to the book, Turkey is receiving heavy visits seeking health care from persons from all over the world. "They go because prices in Turkey compare favorably with even the lowest available in Asia, and the quality of health care is consistently outstanding, with many doctors Western trained and fluent in English".

"No matter where they come from, medical travelers find significant cost savings in Turkey....The estimated cost of cataract surgery (including hospital stay and treatment) is 76 percent...

At the New York Times Travel Show this past Saturday, my daughter Pauline and I spoke about broad trends and developments in travel. But earlier in the day, we were asked to devote our first hour's talk to "Best Travel Bargains in the Months Ahead," and to respond with an objective ranking of those buys, regardless of how we felt about the wisdom of traveling to the places that deserved these low-cost honors.

I responded by naming what I considered the seven categories of "best bargains", ranked objectively:

1) I named as the number one bargain in travel today, that den of iffy entertainment, Las Vegas. The opening two months ago of City Center -- a complex of luxurious skyscraper hotels and condos offering thousands of rooms -- has had a devastating impact on hotel prices there, establishing a ceiling of $149-to-$159 per deluxe room on many weekday dates in March and April. Other hotels of a lesser category have thus had to charge less: $77 per weekday room for many top first class hotels, $50 a room for ordinary first class hotels, $30 and $25 a weekday room for hotels like Circus Circus, Excalibur, or Stratosphere. Add the fact that each of the four major cut-rate carriers flies to Las Vegas (Southwest, Air Tran, Spirit and JetBlue); that car rentals are available at modest rates through BreezeNet.com (www.breezenet.com); and that half-price coupons for leading...

Yesterday, I wrote about the proposed increase in visa fees to foreigners wanting to visit the U.S., raising that price to as much as $150 per person. Keep in mind that's a visa "application" fee; the foreigner asking for a visa isn't guaranteed that he/she will get one, and will be out $150 per person if the visa application is denied. I once met a highly successful young businesswoman in Panama who is unable to visit her sister in California because she fits the profile of a person who might overstay her visit--she's a single woman, and our U.S. policy marks her as desperate to be an illegal immigrant. She is routinely denied a visa, which deprives the U.S. of the potential large expenditures she would otherwise make at our hotels, restaurants and shops.

The visa fee now goes up to $150 ($300 for a couple, $600 for a family of four), discouraging large numbers of would-be visitors from ever coming here. But in making that point, I failed to mention that the fee for obtaining a U.S. passport will also be raised for our own U.S. citizens, brought up to a startling cost of $135 for a first-time passport and to $110 for a renewed passport.

So once again, instead of funding the cost of running the State Department from general tax revenues (which is the fair way to do it), we are charging a user's fee that is a burden not...