Since the 787s returned to service, there have been a number of minor problems occurring with them or their engines, and we’ve resisted the temptation of gleefully writing about each of them, because they truly have seem to be one-off ‘teething problems’ and of little safety concern. But when a problem occurred that caused a United 787 to divert from its planned flight from Denver to Tokyo and instead land in Seattle yesterday afternoon, that [...]

Good morning Happy anniversary to Valentina Tereshkova – on Sunday it will be 50 years since she became the first woman in space. Ms Tereshkova now wishes to be the first woman on Mars.  We wish her good luck – and a long life, because who knows when or even if we’ll see a (wo)manned mission to Mars. And a happy birthday today – we hope – for the Airbus A350 – described in this [...]

It is fairly difficult to be too creative with how you promote something as seemingly generic as a jacket.  But Scott Jordan, founder and inventor of the ScotteVest range of products, continues to come up with new ideas and innovations. In the past we’ve seen him send people around the world on extended journeys with the requirement that everything they travel with be contained within the capacious pockets of one of his jackets, causing him [...]

What part of welcoming foreign visitors and businessmen to the US do we not understand? Is it the bit about the billions of dollars they will spend in our country, or the part about the millions of new jobs that would be created if we restored our country’s share of international travel to the historic levels it used to be, prior to when new ‘keep the foreigners out’ policies were enacted? Do we currently have [...]

Usually I find it hard to write positively about products that ignore my suggestions for improvements, but in this case, the product is all the finer for having ignored the suggestions I offered to the company’s owner.  Please read on, I’ll explain. One of my favorite ‘tools’ that helps me appear as an all-knowing Travel Insider is Ron Salk’s Airport Transit Guide.  For many years this was an annually updated tiny book that one could [...]

Good morning Happy Birthday to WordPress. WordPress first appeared ten years ago, originally as a simple blogging software product.  Today, it has extended to a sophisticated ‘content management system’ that is used by over 60 million websites and blogs, and powers some 18% of all the content on the entire internet.  It is also the underlying product which these days is used to create your weekly newsletter. WordPress is a wonderfully approachable and easy to [...]

There’s no finer luggage on the planet than that made by Briggs & Riley. Indeed, every time I proclaim this self-evident truth, I get a chorus of readers enthusiastically writing in to share their own experiences and delight in this excellent company’s great products. The reason we all like Briggs & Riley products so much is not only because they truly are good, but because they literally put their money where their mouth is, and [...]

Good morning A big newsletter this week (5050 words!). I’ve been focusing on different aspects of Sri Lanka each week as part of explaining why it is our featured 2014 Travel Insider Tour, and hopefully encouraging you to join with twenty of your fellow Travel Insiders on this wonderful experience next February. This week I wanted to talk about safety.  Several potential and now actual members of our group have asked about this. It is [...]

Good morning It’s Memorial Day Weekend – the traditional start of our summer.  Yay. We’ve a slightly lighter compilation this week because you’re probably filled with thoughts of the long weekend, and indeed, one of the two other articles appended to this week’s roundup newsletter is totally and unabashedly off-topic, but to my surprise and delight, is also proving to be unexpectedly popular.  “Hojotoho” to all who understand the term. More directly travel related is [...]