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A number of American airlines are set to charge economy passengers for a second piece of luggage going into the hold on transatlantic flights. 

Delta, Continental, US Airways and American Airlines are imposing a $50 (£30) levy as they face up to their worst cash crisis since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

British Airways – in serious financial trouble – is to charge up to £40 ($65) for a second bag.  And Virgin Atlantic is imposing a one-item limit from late September on economy passengers flying to destinations such as Dubai, Shanghai and Singapore, Any extras will be charged at £35 ($57).

The new charges were condemned by the Chief Executive of the Air Transport Users’ Council, Simon Evans. “It’s just about making money, they just want to get more money out of us,” he said.

He was particularly scathing about BA: “It seems to have buried it on the website. When you think of British Airways’ attack on other airlines’ hidden charges, this does seem like people in glass houses throwing stones.”

The additional fees will hit holidaymakers particularly hard as they normally carry more luggage than business travellers and are more likely to fly economy.  Skiers, snowboarders and golfers, in particular, will be counting the cost.  

by Andy Moreton

Every so often, police forces in the UK list some of the dumber calls they’ve received on the 999 (911 in the US) emergency number.

These have included, from memory, someone whose pet hamster had escaped, a man who wanted to know when the internet had been invented and a woman who’d mislaid her glasses.

Now British embassies around the world say they’re also becoming frustrated by time-wasting callers.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said British embassies were there ‘to assist Britons in real difficulty abroad’. They were not best pleased to receive the following cries for help:

• A mother asked the consulate in Florida to help her teenage son pack his case and give him a lift to the airport as he was feeling under the weather.
• A traveller wanted the High Commission in Zambia to phone his workplace to explain he wouldn’t be in because he couldn’t get a flight.
• A holidaymaker visiting Italy wondered where she could buy a particular pair of shoes.
• One caller asked: “I’m making jam - what ratio of fruit to sugar should I use?”
• A woman rang to say she was unhappy with the size of her newly-enlarged breasts.

Juliet Maric, British consul in Alicante, Spain, said people thought they were a ‘one-stop shop’. “If you have a serious problem abroad - maybe you’ve been involved in an accident, have lost your passport or are a victim of crime - we can help you,” she said.

“But we can’t pay your taxi fares, tell you who’s allowed to use your swimming pool, or do anything about the exchange rate.”

by Andy Moreton

There’s been a warning that the ornate tombs built for the pharaohs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens could vanish within 150 to 500 years, partly because of tourism.

Apparently, the breath of thousands of tourists every day, coupled with poor ventilation, is damaging the carvings and painted decorations inside the chambers.

Egypt’s authorities have taken action to protect the tombs by implementing new ventilation systems and setting a cap on visitor numbers.

For the long term, it’s been decided that some original tombs will eventually be closed to tourists and replaced with replicas. These could include the most visited - those of the boy king, Tutenkhamun, and Queen Nefertiti.

“A team of experts is currently using laser technology to examine these tombs in order to build the replicas, which would then open to visitors in a place near the Valley of the Kings,” said Zahi Hawass, the Head of Antiquities.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique has carefully selected seven of the best luxury hotels in Egypt for your trip of a lifetime, including the sumptuous Al Moudira in Luxor - only two-and-a-half miles from the Valley of the Kings.

The currywurst is something of a national dish in Germany and it’s become so revered that it’s just got its own museum.

A currywurst is a pork sausage that’s fried, chopped into slices and served with lashings of a special curry and ketchup sauce. It’s served at many a street-side kiosk on a cardboard plate with a plastic or wooden fork, together with bread, chips (fries) or potato salad.

The currywurst has been Germany’s favourite snack since 1949 and to mark this 60th anniversary, the 5 million euro (£4 million / $7 million) currywurst museum opened earlier this month – right next to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

Visitors are greeted by a human-sized currywurst puppet and a replica Berlin sausage-stand, before embarking on an interactive tour which traces the dish from its humble origins to the present day. The museum hopes to attract some 350,000 visitors a year.

Not everyone’s crazy about the dish being honoured in this way. At a media preview, demonstrators from Germany’s Vegetarian Society gatecrashed the exhibition, sporting pig snouts and arguing in favour of a vegetarian alternative.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique has some mouth-watering deals at some of the best luxury hotels in Berlin.

A hundred years ago, the Venice Lido was one of Europe’s most glamorous playgrounds for movie stars and royalty, and there’s now going to be a bold attempt to recapture its glory days.

The Lido is an 11-mile strip of land dividing the Venice lagoon from the Adriatic. It comes alive once a year in September for the Film Festival, when it’s besieged by actors, journalists and paparazzi, but for the rest of the year it all goes quiet.

“The Lido has slowly turned residential and gone to sleep, covered in dust,” said Giovanni Gusso, President of the Lido’s municipal council.

Now, hundreds of millions of euros of private funding are being lined up to restore the area’s Art Deco and Art Nouveau gems. In addition, government money is being spent on a new terminal for the city’s vaporetti (water buses).

But (there always seems to be a ‘but’ in these planning developments) one aspect is meeting disapproval – and it concerns the plans to demolish a group of beach huts. These are not just any old huts – they were famously depicted in the iconic closing scene of Visconti’s 1971 film Death In Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde.

More than 2,000 people have signed a petition protesting at the plans to demolish those and the turn-of-the-century Bagni Alberoni pavilion at the south end of the Lido.

Stefano Bartoli, the owner of the Bagni Alberoni bathing establishment, said:

“If these plans go ahead, we will have to close, it’s that simple. It won’t be possible to stay open. And if we close, lots of jobs will be lost and the local community will die – so, too, will a little piece of history.”

by Andy Moreton

Luxique can offer the best available rates at the pick of the luxury hotels in Venice – including the elegant and tranquil Albergo Quattro Fontane on the Lido.

A couple of years ago, at a seaside resort on the west coast of England, I saw a seagull take an ice cream cone clean out of a woman’s hand as she strolled along the promenade.

If pigeons are the scourge of the cities, gulls hold menacing sway by the sea.

Now one resort on the east coast of England is taking drastic action, warning holidaymakers that they could be fined up to £2,500 ($4,100) for feeding the birds – either intentionally or by leaving food waste.

The town council in Aldeburgh, an up-market resort in Suffolk, says the area is under siege from the gulls. The town has two renowned fish and chip shops and therein lies the problem.

Some people have been offering tit-bits of chips (French fries), which has encouraged the birds to swoop and steal food. Other visitors have discarded wrappings, which the gulls scavenge for food scraps. As well as that, holidaymakers and locals alike are woken by their raucous calling.

Aldeburgh, which hosts an internationally-renowned music festival, also has a message for those contemplating walking their dogs on the beach during the summer months – don’t. This offence carries a maximum penalty of £500 ($825).

by Andy Moreton

If you find yourself in Paris this summer, you’ll find that you won’t have to watch your step so much.

Paris has been known in the past as ‘the capital of dog mess’, but stringent fines have led to a marked improvement on the streets. The number of fines issued for mess offences have dropped from almost 5,000 in 2004 to fewer than 2,000 last year.

The Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, had been determined to fix a problem that had had its fair share of adverse publicity. In a Paris-based episode of Sex And The City in 2004, the heroine Carrie fouls her expensive stilettos on the Champs Elysees. And apparently the Japanese used dog-messing as an argument against Paris’s bid for the 2008 Olympics.

François Dagnaud, who works for the town hall’s hygiene unit, conceded that problems persisted with the dense poodle population of the chic 7th and 14th arrondissements. To change owners’ habits, some 90 inspectors are due to carry out ‘commando operations’ in these areas in the autumn.

There is another simpler reason for Paris’s cleaner streets: the number of dogs trotting around the capital has plummeted in the past three years, dropping by a third from 2006-7.

by Andy Moreton

You can get clean away with a bargain if you book your luxury hotel in Paris through Luxique.

This is quite the most bizarre special offer I’ve come across. A luxury resort in the United States is offering rooms for $19 (£11) a night, but you have to sleep in a tent and bring your own toilet paper.

The Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego, California has introduced what it calls its ‘survival package’. It starts at $219 (£132) a night, but as you take away each amenity, it gets cheaper. Thus the $19 tariff means no bed, towels, toiletries, loo paper or even lighting.

You’d have to be mad, wouldn’t you? Well, apparently when a similar promotion was run in June, 100 people took up the offer.

The declining economy has taken its toll on the Rancho Bernardo, which boasts three pools, a golf course, three restaurants and a spa in a 200,000-acre luxury resort.

“During a brainstorming session, we were talking about discounts and promotions and wanted to come up with something different,” said Rancho Bernardo’s General Manager, John Gates.

“We wanted to do something fun and clever. It’s a way of making the best of these bad economic times and trying to give customers an experience.”

The promotion has again proved so popular that it’s apparently been extended to September.

by Andy Moreton

I wrote in June about how Prague was seeing fewer stag (bachelor) weekend parties from the UK, which was proving a mixed blessing.

Now I read that another popular haunt for pre-wedding tour groups – the Latvian capital, Riga – has lost patience with the drunken revelry and is considering introducing a special tourist police force.

The arrival of low-budget airlines and the prospect of cheap beer have made Riga, like Prague, an attractive destination. Both cities have been torn between welcoming this boost to their troubled economies and fearing that the British visitors could ruin their image.

The main complaint in Latvia is over tourists who urinate on Riga’s central Freedom Monument, a 138-ft high memorial topped with the figure of Liberty honouring soldiers who died fighting for the country’s independence. Visitors are often arrested for relieving themselves on it or for clambering on to it naked to have their pictures taken.

Last year, Latvia’s then interior minister, Mareks Seglins, lashed out at ‘English pigs’ for being a ‘dirty, hoggish people’.

Figures from the UK Foreign Office suggest that badly-behaved Britons are causing an increasing nuisance in other countries. The annual ‘British Behaviour Abroad’ report, a study of fifteen popular destinations, showed that the number of Britons arrested had risen by almost 16 per cent. “Many arrests are due to behaviour caused by drinking,” the report said.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique offers the most competitive rates at two superb luxury hotels in Riga – the traditional Hotel Grand Palace and the contemporary Ainavas.

There are plans to turn the former Hong Kong home of movie legend Bruce Lee into a museum.

The two-storey mansion is currently a ‘love motel’, where rooms are discreetly rented by the hour, but a design competition has been launched to turn it into a permanent tribute to the martial arts superstar. His many fans have been calling for this for years.

Lee’s daughter, Shannon, and a panel of architects and town planners will judge the competition, and the winners will be announced towards the end of the year. The museum is likely to include a memorial hall, a library, a kung fu studio and a film archive.

Lee became a source of Chinese pride by portraying characters that defended the Chinese and the working class from oppressors in films such as Return Of The Dragon. He died in Hong Kong in 1973 at the age of just 32.

by Andy Moreton

Hong Kong has been called ‘the glittering jewel of the Orient’, with both modern and traditional architecture, and top-class shopping. The Harbour City mall in Kowloon, for instance, has 700 stores. And for a luxurious stay, Luxique offers the best deals at some of Hong Kong’s most prestigious hotels, including the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, the Mandarin Oriental, the Four Seasons Hong Kong and the Langham.