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Accor Hotels will consolidate its budget brands starting in 2012. The least-expensive chains — Formule 1 and Etap — will be renamed Ibis Budget and have blue signage and logos. Current Ibis hotels (red logos) will retain their designation. Accor’s All Season chain will be renamed Ibis Style and sport green signage and logos.
We asked any of you who attended a concert, a recital or any music or dance performance or stage production outside of the US in the last couple of years to tell us how you learned about it and how you obtained tickets. We requested the following.
by Bill Altaffer; San Diego, CA
I am so grateful to ITN subscriber Nancy Anderson (Feb. ’07, pg. 67), who told of her excellent experiences with Mehmet Ozbalci, owner of Turfantastik (Millet cad. Inan Is Hani No. 5/610, Aksaray, Istanbul, Turkey; phone [90] 212 589 33 25). I had kept her article, as I knew I wanted to visit Turkey.
My partner, Carolyn, and I took a three-week trip to Switzerland, Bulgaria and Romania, Feb. 26-March 19, 2011, with Far West Ski Association (310/319-3757). This trip, like others organized by the FWSA about March every year, was part skiing and part touring.
Each week could be booked separately, but the cost for all three weeks was about $4,200 per person. That included transatlantic airfare from San Francisco or Los Angeles; 20 hotel nights in three- and four-star hotels; all breakfasts and most dinners, and a number of parties.
It was my privilege to visit Tiya as part of a trip to Ethiopia with Spiekermann Travel Service (Eastpointe, MI; 800/645-3233) in January ’11. Tiya is regarded as the most important of the 160 archaeological sites in the Soddo region south of Addis Ababa.
Thirty-six huge stone monoliths, 32 of which bear strange carvings of swords and other signs and symbols, stand clustered in the tall grasses of a large field less than a kilometer outside the small town of Tiya. The stelae were designated a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site in 1980.
My friend Sue and I, both in our eighties, are always looking for a destination to which neither of us has been. Therefore, we were delighted when our travel agent recommended a cruise on the Douro River, which originates in northern Spain and flows west across the northern part of Portugal into the Atlantic at the city of Porto.
My husband, Mark, and I took a Holland America Line (HAL) cruise on the Rotterdam from San Diego, California, to Callao, Peru, and back, Oct. 23-Nov. 22, 2010. We paid about $7,500 for the two of us.
I stay part of the year in Bangkok, Thailand, where I have an apartment. In fall 2010, for the first time, I used a luggage-forwarding service called Luggage Free to send over some of my possessions. It was just household bric-a-brac (clothing, books, DVDs, etc.).
by Carl Chavez, Graeagle, CA
My wife, Margaret, and I have made many trips to Great Britain, often to visit her cousin near Oxford and our friends in Scotland. On our September ’10 visit, we were looking for a different experience.