Storify is a clever new platform which allows users to spin narratives or plot timelines by curating tweets, Facebook updates and pictures, Flickr and Hipstamatic galleries, and YouTube videos into one manageable ‘story’.

Storifying our Alentejo visit also allows us to make immediate use of the images and footage assembled on the trip, quickly creating a comprehensive, content-rich reference point for interested media, and to instantly provide some return on ]investment for our new client – we signed a contract to represent the Costa Alentejana Tourist Board while we were out there, as this ‘story’ reveals:

AN ALENTEJO ADVENTURE

On a recent solo trip to Prague, as the night sky arrived and the winter chill started to hurt my face, I was encouraged to head indoors to a cosy museum. 

As I went on a museum hunt, little did I know I was about to have one of the scariest experiences of my life. I was lured into the Artbanka Museum of Young Art (AMoYA) because of its attention-grabbing exhibit – Guns, by David Cerby – free for all to see on arrival. The gigantic guns were showcased in the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers in New York in 1994 and the gun points alternate between producing three incredibly loud sounds: banging, the flushing of a toilet or howling brakes. Lovely.

I immediately bought a ticket. I would go on to witness a range of contemporary art – a lot of it rather provocative and bordering on shocking; some just plain frightening. But the museum’s unique building definitely left a lasting impression – reinforced by the intense artwork and its horrifying audio.

AMoYA is housed in the formerly grand, but now terribly run-down, Colleredo-Mandfeld Palace. A victim of the communist era, the palace has been left to deteriorate badly, with some beautiful features pointlessly torn down. It was fascinating but wandering around it – pretty much on my own – was the first time I’ve ever truly felt I was experiencing haunted surroundings. The air was bitterly cold and shadows seemed to appear in the poorly-lit rooms. The artwork contributed to my growing nerves – think fake dead bodies laid under a rug, a room filled with dolls that had missing heads and a rocking horse tilting back and forth.

The fear I felt reminded me of the Pasaje Del Terror in Blackpool– an extreme, haunted-house theme-park attraction where actors in masks chase you through the dark. Without fail, it always ends with even the most brave visitors sprinting out of the exit screaming (watch reactions here to see for yourself). With visions of a ghostly figure about to appear to chase me out of AMoYA and the sound of yet another loud toilet flush coming from the guns outside, I tried my very best not to exit Colleredo-Mandfeld Palace in a similar style.

Blackpool memories aside, with many historical buildings across Prague beautifully restored after the fall of Communism, a visit to Colleredo-Mandfeld Palace offers a fascinating and chilling insight into the destruction of buildings, not to mention many of their inhabitants, during this period. It’s definitely worth a visit if you ever go to Prague: just make sure you go in a group, in daylight, and do some deep breathing!

Continuing our innovative social media work, Travel PR will be documenting its latest overseas visit via the means of Storify.

Between 9-12 February, Sue, Mika and Anthony will be exploring Portugal’s uncharted Alentejo region.  Updates on the trip, delivered through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram and YouTube, will be neatly collated on a Storify story called An Alentejo Adventure – allowing any interested parties to learn more about the visit, and about the Alentejo as a whole.

Storify is an emerging online application that allows users to tell ‘stories’ by curating myriad information delivered across the internet’s social media websites.  With so many of these websites now in use, it works as a handy means of simplifying user experience, and of time-saving.  At the moment it’s little-known, but Travel PR expects it to be much more widespread fairly quickly.

NB: As with so many websites and platforms, Storify currently doesn’t run smoothly on Internet Explorer – so we’d advise using Chrome, Firefox or Safari for the best browsing experience!

Tourism and schools are subjects upon which most of us feel able to offer an opinion because we all went to school and most of us go on holiday. So, putting the two together, it is easy to understand the temptation faced by Government ministers to occasionally seek favour by bemoaning the ‘exorbitant’ cost of getting away in the school holidays. They might be surprised to hear that I share their concern but I am sure that they would be disappointed to discover that the solution lies in their hands, not ours.

Squeezing families’ holiday opportunities into the same few weeks a year creates an artificial imbalance in the supply and demand for holidays. The laws of the market then take hold and prices increase with higher demand and drop as it slackens. The price increase is not just profiteering by the holiday industry, but driven by a need to earn more income in the short period of high demand to offset the low demand during the shoulder periods.

The negative effects on the customer are obvious, with higher prices and less choice for the peak periods. But the consequences of the current policy go beyond a simple distortion of the market. The annual influx means that we have to plan our transport links to deal with the periods of demand that only last for a few weeks of the year or suffer congestion that is a real threat to the success of our industry. The same applies for all our services, from water and sewerage to beach safety and the hospitals. Environmental impact would also be easier to manage if the same demand was more evenly spread through the year.

Tourism operators also have their own concerns about this market distortion. Just like any other industry, we only survive if we satisfy our customers and having our best customers facing less choice, higher prices and congestion only makes it more difficult to encourage them back in the shoulder periods. Those of us with 100% occupancy during the summer school holidays know that we could hike our prices even higher and make more profit in the short term, but we don’t because we need to keep our customers’ loyalty to fill the quieter periods.

Other European countries stagger school holidays by district in order to overcome this market distortion and that seems to make very good sense. Stretching the period of peak demand flattens the price curve, gives the customer more choice and eases congestion. This wouldn’t be popular with every operator, however. Those that hang out the vacancy sign for a few weeks of the year knowing that there will always be custom would find life more difficult when the same peak season demand was spread across seven or eight weeks rather than five.

Yet that simple action could have a considerable impact on the general standard of accommodation in the UK. It is not surprising that more customer complaints come from the ‘school holidays only’ sector because short-term operators do not earn enough to justify investing the time or resources into improving their product from one year to the next. Spreading the peak demand period would make it more difficult for these operators to take advantage of the market distortion and would remove a source of some of the industry’s worst complaints.

Any such change would obviously have to have the support of schools. The education of our children must be the first priority. I would not presume to know all I need to know on this topic and must be guided by the experts.  However, spreading the holiday-taking period must surely make parents less inclined to remove their children during the term time.

The staggering of holidays needs only to be for two or three weeks in the summer and one or two weeks for the rest of the year to have a significant impact. It would stretch the Christmas, Easter and half-term periods as well as the summer, which would allow the tourist industry to employ more people year-round – and that, in turn, would provide the incentive to train staff and give them a proper career path. So, when our young people leave school, they could continue to progress in well-paid jobs which would give them a sound future.

Our local boozer, the St Margaret's Tavern

This got me thinking about Travel PR’s own St. Margaret’s in London which, despite being where I spend most workdays, has never puzzled me until now. Who was St. Margaret and what did she do to warrant an area between Richmond and Twickenham – complete with National Rail station – being named after her?

A quick Google search and a whole list of St. Margarets come up. And, as it transpires, not only does does London have a St. Margaret’s, but so too are there St Margarets in Australia, Canada and Italy, amongst others.

Head to the other side of the world, south-east of Melbourne, and you’ll also come across Saint Margaret Island, which acts as a sandy barrier to Corner Inlet, a Marine National Park. The island has a namesake closer to home – off the Pembrokeshire coast, next to Caldey Island. Staying close(ish) to home, there’s also St Margaret’s Hope up in the Orkney Islands – the third largest settlement in Orkney and home to around 550 residents.

This saintly lady – or ladies, as it turns out (for there were two Saint Margarets: Saints of Antioch and of Scotland, respectively) – can also lay claim to a bus station in Leicester, a church within the grounds of Westminster Abbey and a pebbly bay at Cliffe in Kent – the closest point in the UK to France and from where many set off on cross-Channel swims.

Going back to the Margarets themselves, the first (of Antioch) died in 304 A.D. and, or so the story goes, had an encounter with the devil in the form of a dragon. The other, who died in 1093, had a more fairytale life, escaping England as Princess Margaret, only to fall in love with King Malcolm of Scotland.

Santa Margherita Ligure

Meanwhile, across the pond there’s St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia, opening out onto the Atlantic. “A scenic spot and popular with sailors” the brochures say, highlighting its wildlife and ‘Lighthouse Route’. Translate Margaret into Italian, and the name becomes the somewhat more exotic-sounding Margherita, giving way to Santa Margherita Ligure. Aha, here’s one I do know about – it’s on my client Essential Sailing’s new Italian route. An elegant seaside town, it too is popular with the boating crowd and, less known than glitzy neighbouring Portofino, boasts a laidback feel.

But really, this is just skimming the surface of the St. Margaret world; take away the saintly prefix and there are even more – Margaret Island in Budapest, Isla de Margarita in Venezuela, the city Margaret in Alabama… one of the planet Uranus’ 27 moons is even called Margaret!

Despite all these Margarets dotted across the world, the name itself hasn’t appeared on charts of England and Wales’ Top 100 Baby Names for a number of years, with Olivias, Sophies and Emilys taking the lead… Perhaps we’ll soon see a host of bus stations, islands and astronomical discoveries following suit.

Helena Hamlyn.

Summer 2012 brings with it the long anticipated Olympic Games. But even at the beginning of the bidding process, back at the start of the millennium when the country was more prosperous, the nation was divided as to whether the Games would be good for the country.

With a £20 per year council tax rise needed to fund the event, many Londoners have challenged the high cost of the Games.  The ongoing battle between West Ham United and the Olympic Legacy Company also raises the possibility of us being left with ‘white-elephant’ sites like the Millennium Dome once was.

The rest of the country also remains divided, with some fearing the whole of the United Kingdom will be forced to help fund the Olympics, for no benefit.

Those that are looking forward to the spectacle of London 2012 placed their bids for event tickets in March 2011.  Many seemed to apply for a range of tickets in the hope of getting something, even if it was for an event in which they had no interest.  Out of all of my friends and acquaintances, none were successful in getting tickets, even for the most obscure of events.

For a London-based business like ourselves, the Olympics bring a whole new set of problems. Will employees be able to make it into the office?  Will internet and telecoms services stand up under the strain? Most of all, as an outbound tour operator, what we do not know, of course, is how the games will affect people’s desire to travel.

Whenever a big sporting event takes place, there is no doubt that it impacts on peoples’ travel plans.  Whilst England remained in the World Cup in 2010, bookings died away.  As soon as they were knocked out, there was a surge in calls from people wanting to escape to Greece.  I am therefore never in favour with sport-loving friends during such events because I am always willing our national teams to exit competitions early!

On a personal front, my home in Windsor is situated on the main access road to Dorney Lake, host to the rowing event.  Despite the huge amounts spent on road improvement projects, it is still anticipated that traffic congestion will be unbearable.

So wouldn’t it be best to leave it all behind, head for the sun and escape all the headaches?
Whilst I was away over Christmas, several people asked if I had considered renting my property out for people attending the Games.  It hadn’t even crossed my mind!  However, the following day on returning to the office, we had an enquiry from someone wanting to book a villa in Greece because they had rented their property out to Olympics attendees. Since then we have had a steady flow of bookings from clients with similar ideas.  Two ladies with flats in central London were quite pleased to announce that they were having a free holiday because it was being paid for by the proceeds of their Olympic rentals!

It seems there are two possible options; either pay an agent specialising in short-term lets, or do it yourself. Agents will typically charge a commission of between 10%-15% plus VAT. The advantage is that they provide a contract and, crucially, collect the money.

Those that are a little more techno-savvy and want to avoid paying commission can put their property on one of the many websites or mobile apps that have sprung up.  Fees to use these websites seem to vary from £25 to £150 and you will need to take your own photos and write a detailed description. Of course, this route leaves it to the property owner to agree a price, collect the rent and deal with the client – although some sites do seem to be offering meet-and-greet, cleaning and laundry services.

If you are lucky enough to live in close proximity of the Olympic site and are willing to be out of your house for a longer period, people working at the Games are having to rent accommodation for up to six weeks.  Although a lot of these rentals will have been placed by now there may still be a chance of getting a month in the sun by moving out of your property and letting it out.

With some predicting three-bedroomed family houses close to the stadium renting for up to £5,000 a week, it could be a chance to get a luxury holiday for the family for nextto-nothing.  At a time when spending power is being squeezed, this  sounds like a perfect solution.

I still haven’t decided what form my London 2012 experience will take.  I am told there is a shortage of male performers for the opening ceremony, so I may well audition to carry a flag!

This much we know: milk bars first originated in Australia in the early 1930s, and then quickly spread to New Zealand, the USA, Wales and England, which had over 1,000 outlets by the end of 1936.  They were places where youngsters could congregate over milkshakes and ice creams.  By the ‘50s they had begun to often feature jukeboxes and pinball machines (e.g. The Fonz’s hang-out in Happy Days), and soon enough they morphed into bars and/or fast-food outlets; the traditional, simple milk bar, as it first appeared, was seemingly no more.  (The modern ‘milk bars’ found in Australia are actually more what we’d call convenience stores, a retail outlet rather than a place to stop and chat.)

To some, this demise may have been a good thing.  In New Zealand, the 1950s milk bar scene led directly to the country’s first modern gangs, as groups of rowdy youth loitered around the bars and became known as ‘milk bar cowboys’.  According to Teara, “these young men wore leather jackets and wind-breakers, slicked down their hair, and rode motorcycles. Their favourite meeting spots were milk bars.”

As we made for our millennium, modern descendants of the milk bar began appearing: in particular Shakeaway led a  troop of milkshake-focused bars, most operating in a fast-food format and typically not offering seating.

And now, suddenly, milk bars – or at least, variations thereof – are returning, as our taste for retro style continues apace.  The initial tremors seemingly have an unlikely source – in June 2011, the UK’s Yorkshire Post newspaper declared that “milk bars, a firm 1950s favourite, are now hotspots in both Hebden Bridge and Halifax town centre, thanks to mother of two Alison Bartram.”  Bartram’s bars actually sound like vintage versions of Shakeaway.

Meanwhile, the two recent instalments across the pond tick a much slicker, serious box.  First there was Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar in Manhattan, dishing up ‘Cereal Milk’, plus cakes, pies, shakes and ‘Compost Cookies’, which come filled with pretzels, potato chips, coffee, oats, butterscotch and chocolate chips.  Then followed Brooklyn’s Milk Bar (any self-respecting fad-checker knows a trend isn’t a trend until it ‘s been verified in Brooklyn), although this one’s qualifications are dubious, as it does serves coffee, doesn’t serve straightforward milk drinks, and even stretches to selling wine at night. 

In short, neither seems to be a ‘milk bar’ in the classic, supposedly-innocent teenage hang-out sense.  Instead, this is apparently a modern equivalent: the cool, 2:1-era version.

(by Richard Mellor)

In an email conversation last week, the travel journalist Sarah Barrell told me that the Waterberg Mountains region of South Africa, up by the Botswanan border, was referred to as ‘God’s Own Country’ by its locals.

Hang on a minute, I said – isn’t it Kerala that’s God’s own country?  Marketing campaigns and handling Real Holidays’ India PR for four years have taught me that.  How can a pocket of South Africa also be his country? How many countries can this guy have?!

Quite a few, it turns out. According to Wikipedia, “’God’s Own Country’, often abbreviated to ‘Godzone’ or less often ‘Godzown’, is a phrase that has been used for more than 100 years by New Zealanders to describe their homeland.  It has subsequently been adopted by some other countries, notably Australia, but this has declined as the phrase has become increasingly associated with New Zealand”.

In addition, Brazil is often cited with the moniker (along with ‘God’s Own Playground’ – every deity needs a leisure area, after all), as is, more improbably, Yorkshire.  Armenia and Ulster have also been given the label, although this is for more straightforwardly religious reasons, rather than a boast of physical splendour.  Still, it seems that God is quite the land-owner these days.

(The religious argument here is obviously that the entire world is God’s, and thus he owns all countries and can have any he wants. Which is a fair point.)

Either way, it seems that even God’s countries aren’t oblivious to trouble.  The First Post India today described an entirely un-deified Kerala: “The moral rot in the state — which brands itself as ‘God’s own country’ — has reached its head. This has been a steady decadence that many conveniently chose to ignore.”  

Phew – it sure ain’t easy, this landlord thing…

(by Richard Mellor)

The Masseria Mandrascate

Recent travels took me on a whistle-stop tour of the agriturismo properties of Sicily – converted farmhouses that make their own organic produce, including olive oil, wine and even limoncello.  Having escaped the near freezing temperatures in London, the thrill of being on the road in the balmy 19° C heat of a Sicilian winter(!) suited me right down to the ground.

My primary objective in Sicily – as set by Sunvil Discovery – was to see and taste the real Sicily.  As I journeyed from Palermo to Agrigento, through the Enna region and out to Siracuse and Catania, I set about sampling as much regional olive oil and wine as possible – not to mention glorious Sicilian torroncini e Paste di mandorla (soft nougat and almond dolce), traditionally served as a complement to a properly-made espresso.

...un gallo...

In the land where you can have cake (yes, cake!) for breakfast, I can report that the olive oil is fresh – green, almost – and the wine is quaffable, in spite of being 2-3% stronger than the average European brew.  When it comes to cheese, the Piacentinu Ennese (a saffron infused sheep-milk’s studded with peppercorns) was a particular highlight – a cheese that really says “I’m a cheese!” and demands to be followed with a gulp of vino rosso.

A typical Sicilian gent, proudly posing next to his Fiat Panda 750

It was, however, the salumi tipici that really completed this sensory experience.  The Black Pig prosciutto and smoked sausage from Enna was strong and spicy, with a mature flavour that was, for me, the focal point of the region’s full-flavour cuisine – ideal for foodies who really like to taste what they eat.  A typically Ennese accompaniment to this is a slice of 100% moist pig’s fat, which cleanses the palate in between mouthfuls.

When in Sicily, however, one can’t just eat like a Sicilian to develop a rounded understanding of the culture.  In my journey to capture the real Sicily, I learned that one must dress like a Sicilian – wearing one more layer than necessary (a jumper or a blazer will do); trim one’s facial hair to the appropriate fashionable length – long enough to look make it look deliberate; drive through the countryside like Etna’s in mid-pyroclastic flow (in case you were wondering, the Vespa of Sicily is the young man’s Fiat Panda); and – when offered something ‘piccolo’ to eat – never to say no.

Noel touching down in Portugal's Alentejo

The pound is strengthening against the euro, yet it seems some tour operators are levying surcharges.  Part of the problem seems to be the fact that the dollar is strengthening and fuel prices remain high, which represents a double whammy, as fuel is paid for in dollars.

Sunvil has traditionally hedged both its fuel and currency requirements and to do this we have to put up cash collateral of between £350,000 and £400,000.  I can’t remember when we last surcharged, but it was probably during the first oil crisis back in the late 1980s.

2012 will be no exception.  We had already anticipated the increase in European  Air Passenger Duty (APD) and also the effects on seat rates as a result of the introduction of the carbon emissions trading scheme for airlines from 1 January 2012.  Once our clients have booked, then they can be certain that there will be no surcharges on their holiday.

Sicily, a cheap destination in 2012?

But, because of the crisis in the Eurozone, the chances are that the euro will remain weak and so this is the year in which to visit Italy, Greece and Portugal.  Currently, sterling is trading at around €1.2 / 1.21 against the euro, while for the whole of last year it was about €1.15.  This is an improvement of approximately 5%.  Not only that, but in all three countries, local prices have either remained static or have fallen because of recession.

All in all, provided that the status quo continues (and who can be certain of anything these days?!) Europe will be cheaper this year than last, and countries like Greece, Portugal and Italy will be anxious to please, as tourism is vital for their economies.

If the organisation you book with – whether it’s an airline, a tour operator or a web-based company – doesn’t guarantee that they won’t surcharge once you’ve paid for your holiday, then why book with them?  Surcharges mean that they either haven’t planned forward or that they are boosting their profits at your expense!