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E L L I O T T' S TRAVEL NOTES
Travel news, opinion and analysis

March 12, 2004

Is Spain Still a Safe Destination?
More than 12 million Britons visit Spain each year, but despite yesterday's bombing, the British government and tourism officials insisted the country remained safe to visit. Last month, terror group Eta warned that tourists would be prime targets, and that it would strike at popular holiday spots this year. It follows a string of attacks in resorts in recent years, which have killed and injured a number of people, but produced nothing on the scale of yesterday's attack. The Foreign Office said it was constantly reviewing its travel advice. It urged people to be alert to the threat posed by Basque separatists, but emphasized the vast majority of visits to Spain were "trouble-free." The Association of British Travel Agents said yesterday's bombings were not targeted at tourists. Yorkshire Post | Posted 6 a.m.
-- Reuters: Euro travel stocks sink after bombing
-- Scotsman: British travelers will still visit Spain

• Spain is visited by one million Americans every year, making it the seventh-most popular international destination. Will these attacks have any effect on those numbers? I doubt it. Send us your comments.

Bogus Hawaii Deals Scam Travelers
Marshall figured he was sharp enough to spot a scam. He thought that even as he wrote almost $400 in checks to a California company that gave him nothing in return. Marshall is one of dozens of people who say they were swindled by a company that advertised beachfront vacations in Hawaii at prices that couldn't be beat. The offers from a group known as SFS Properties International appeared in travel sections of newspapers across the nation. Marshall, who lives in Gladstone and says he is too embarrassed to use his full name, saw the ad in late December in The Sunday Oregonian. It offered a week in a Hawaiian beachfront condo, plus a rental car, for $395, or one month for $1,295. The Oregonian | Posted 6:20 a.m.
-- Sun-Sentinel: Premier Travel pays $135,000 fine

Airline Traffic Slips in BTS Report
The U.S. Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported that U.S. airlines carried 49.3 million domestic passengers in December, 1.2 percent less than in December 2002. However, revenue passenger miles, a measure of the number of passengers and the distance flown, were up 0.5 percent. And available seat-miles, a measure of airline capacity, were up 3.6 percent. Load factor, a measure of how many seats are sold and used, was down 2.2 percentage points. The busiest airline was Delta and the busiest airport was Atlanta. BTS | Posted 6:30 a.m.
-- BTS: Flight delays are on the rise

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• And finally ... I noticed that year, the nation's hotels made an average of $532 per available room on calls, down about 20 percent from 2002, according to PKF Consulting. In response, some properties have begun installing illegal cell-phone jammers to force guests to use the expensive hotel phones. That's just not fair. Posted 6:40 a.m. | Send us your comments.

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