Wedding Dress, Jewelry Trends and Cash Back Credit Cards
From around the web, you can tell it’s still engagement season.
The New York Times has pointed out a trend where brides are ditching the full-body wedding dresses in favor of more revealing attire in The Bride Wore Very Little.
For brides that want the ultimate bling on their big day, without paying a fortune, Adorn Brides has you covered.
Finally, although not related to weddings, George Hobica has written yet another article highlighting why airline frequent flier credit cards are not the best bet if you’re looking to maximize the value.
Airline Mergers
A few airline mergers are being discussed in the United States. Although they would undoubtedly help the airlines, the benefits to the consumers is harder to see. US News has put together a great grid of cities that would be affected by the change…usually in the form of higher prices on certain routes, with less competition and fewer flights.
Worst Travel Agents
The Aviation Consumer Protection Division, a government agency, has released their most-oft complained about ‘travel agencies’ in 2007. Not unsurprisingly, machine driven dot-com services dominate the list for issues with reservations, ticketing and refunds.
5. Priceline.com & Cheapoair.com
4. CheapTickets.com
3. Expedia.com
2. Travelocity.com
1. Orbitz.com
Returning Stolen Hotel Items
Because it’s a Friday, I couldn’t help passing on this amusing article about returning stolen goods to their hotels. The habit of picking up hotel-embroidered glasses, towels and other nick-knacks adds up to a 100M each year (although that number also includes employee theft). The most popular items to pilfer? Engraved wine glasses.
What I do when I lose an internet connection
Fear not, traveler. Those losses of internet connection are not confined to just your home, that dodgy internet café in Bangkok or 20,000 feet above sea level. Sometimes, it even happens at the office.
Being that TheBigDay.com is, indeed, a dot-com company, it’s no surprise that I feel a little lost when our office’s connection to the online world disappears. Although the site itself is hosted in a super secure facility with multiple lines connecting it to the internet, the same can’t be said about AT&Ts service to our office and others in downtown Portland, which kept a number of us from getting online one afternoon last week.
Since I know there are fellow suffers out there, I thought it would be helpful to list the work-related things I do when I’m without a connection:
- Clean off my desk
- Eat lunch (if it’s the appropriate time)
- File old emails that are still sitting in my in-box
- Check the connection by glancing at the icon and making sure it’s on auto-connect
- Respond to emails that I discover I never responded to (so I can clean them out of my in-box) to send when the connection reappears
- Work on updating copy for the site (like my 2008-specific bio!) in Word
- Eat a snack from the break room (for which it’s always an appropriate time)
- Write a blog entry (still in Word)
- Check the connection by clicking on reconnect
- Catch up on my offline reading: Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Bridal Guide, Portland Bride and Groom, Travel + Leisure and a host of other industry publications
- Practice my handwriting by writing a few thank-yous the old-fashioned way
- Organize my drawers
- Check the connection by clicking on reconnect incessantly
- Finally, if it has reached this point and I have done everything on my list, I threaten to go home. To do this, pack your bags, put everything away, get out your car keys or your bus pass and you are almost assured that your internet connection will re-appear
Relaunched Fiji and Portland Travel Sites
Two of my favorite tourism boards – Fiji’s and our own in Portland, relaunched their websites this week. They both look great. The Fiji Tourism Board features moving panoramas of nature scenes and easy-to-navigate drop down tabs for a variety of sections. This will be great for showcasing all the stunning scenery that exists among the 333 islands.
The Portland Tourism Board has done away with the official and bureaucratic-sounding “Portland Oregon Visitors Association (POVA)” in favor of the Travel Portland brand they’ve slowly been integrating the past few years. This site looks almost a little too clean, and the top navigation-only option is a little hard to find. But, I’m very impressed by their integration of local blogs’ RSS on the right hand side. Very web 2.0 of them – big kudos! Since they just launched, I’ll be patient with the fact those links don’t all work (aka, they default back to travelportland.com, which gets you nowhere) The logo is fun…a little whimsical, but then again, Portland is a little whimsical too…
Everest Climber Obit
On the road, fellow travelers are full of ‘I can top you” tales of escapades, triumphs and tribulations in countries around the world. However, this guy – Sir Edmund Hillary – had one of the best of all. The first man to ever reach the summit of Mt. Everest, along with Tenzing Norgay in 1953. He was 88 years old and widely considered one of New Zealand’s finest public figures.
Replacing a Child’s Lost Passport: Statement of Consent
I came across a rule the other day that all parents who are traveling with children outside of the country should know.
If ever a child is traveling without both natural parents (i.e. just mom, or dad and step-mom, or with another family member) and loses his or her passport (or discovers it stolen), the child can only get another passport if both parents agree…which required a notarized document.
In order to avoid a frantic call home requesting a notarized letter from the child’s missing natural parent(s), the traveling parent or family member should carry a notarized letter allowing for the child to receive a replacement passport if his or her is lost or stolen.
This is the case with United States of America-issued passports and may not necessarily be required for minors traveling on passports from from other countries. You can find a Statement of Consent form on the government website.
Rules of Regifting: Allowing the Ungift?
Time after time, we hear that one reason people use TheBigDay honeymoon registry is because they can control what they want to receive….there’s no one at the store telling you that you have to register for china, or that your marriage won’t be complete without a matching set of holiday snowman spoons. With the honeymoon registry there’s no need for returns, re-gifting, or the newest breach in gift-giving etiquette, ungifting.
According to the Chicago Tribune, ungifting is the latest trend in Getting Rid of Stuff You Don’t Want in exchange for cash. Forgo the awkwardness of asking for a receipt or explaining to your aunt why you don’t love her hand-knit, three sizes to large sweater. Take it over to eBay or Craigslist and sell it for a song and get something truly worthwhile…or, in the case of a disproportionate number of subjects in CT article, video games.
Not surprisingly, it’s the unwanted, unloved, and overlooked holiday gifts that are flooding the ‘net right now. It’s not scientific or anything, but I’m willing to bet that more than one wedding couple has sold off their unwanted gifts in exchange for something that really matters to them. Isn’t it so much better to register for things you want?
Where do all the Males and Uneducated Search?
I was trolling through my emails and RSS feeds today, trying to catch up with all the ‘Best of 2007′ lists that came out when I was gone over the holidays. Quantcast’s caught my attention for their list of US Site Rankings and advertising status. In addition to listing the traffic numbers and whether or not the site accepted advertising, they also included a note on the site’s audience.
All of the search engines I have ever been known to use in the past dozen years made the cut, including
1. Yahoo.com 129M+ U.S. monthly uniques. The site caters to a more educated, slightly female slanted following.
2. Google.com 121M+ U.S. monthly uniques. This site caters to a fairly wealthy, more educated audience
3. AOL.com 58M+ U.S. monthly uniques. This site attracts a slightly more female than male group.
8. MSN.com 48M+ U.S. monthly uniques. This site caters to a more educated audience.
11. Live.com 43M+ U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a more educated audience.
22. Ask.com 25M+ U.S. monthly uniques. The site caters to a slightly more female than male audience.
With not one search engine in the top 25 laying claims to either the ’slightly less’ educated audience or more males than females, it begs the question – where do the un(der)educated or male species search on the web??? I realize more women than men may use the Internet, with increasing numbers of users among the educated vs. uneducated, but this disparity still seems slightly suspicious…
