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Helsinki hostels carry the most inexpensive prices when it comes to having a place to stay in Finland's capital city.

Learn more about Alaskan cultures of the rainforest, Athabascan people of the Interior, the Aleuts and Inuit from the north at the Alaska Heritage Center in Anchorage.

Location: Mechelen - Belgium
Photo: Grote Markt Cafes

Wellington, New Zealand contains many small but interesting museums, where visitors can learn about Kiwi society, culture, art, sports, and history.

/Kevin Rushby Summer in Denmark Photograph: Kevin Rushby

spike digital Lastminute.com will continue to pursue other companies for alleged infringement of its trademark after taking legal action against Virgin Holidays this week. The online travel agency has stepped up its threat against online brands whose messaging or actions it believes will confuse consumers. Following news from the High Court that Virgin Holidays had been served with a document demanding damages over copyright infringement, lastminute.com denied the move is a publicity stunt. Virgin Holidays’ retained agency Spike Digital created a website – dontleaveituntilthelastminute.com – to drive traffic to the operator’s homepage – a move which upset lastminute.com’s lawyers and prompted the legal action against Virgin (rather than SD). A lastminute.com sp

Authorities act to protect tourists but are accused of indiscriminate killing of wild dogs. Linus Moran reports.

Holiday Taxis spin off Business Taxis has revamped its booking platform and widened its destination coverage as part of a site relaunch. The business transfer specialist enables travel management companies and corporate travellers to pre-book transfers in 70 countries including the UK The service allows customers to make single bookings or open an account as well as enabling companies to set travel policies and produce management reports. A carbon- offset function is also a feature of the new site.   Strategy director Russell Parr claimed no one else offered such coverage or range or product with full control of ground transport expenditure.   The next development will be the integration of business taxis into the global distribution systems as well as the white label solutions and XML integrations for customers.

Skyscanner is taking another step towards becoming a more comprehensive travel search engine by launching a hotel channel for the first time, Travolution can reveal. The new accommodation search facility – released to the site this week – follows just a few months after the Edinburgh-based meta search engine unveiled car hire tools to go alongside its successful and original flight product. The hotel channel will be powered existing accommodation meta search engine HotelsCombined , giving Skyscanner access to 200,000 hotels in 195 countries around the world. The car hire search tool is currently run by Dublin-based CarTrawler. HotelsCombined uses product lines from the likes of booking.com, Expedia, hotels.com, gtahotels.com and LateRooms. Skyscanner will roll out the hotel search facilities across sites in 20 markets during July, using

A global study of more than 1,300 online travellers has identified a number of frustrations with travel websites, with one-third identifying the lack of response to email queries as a major irritation. The study was carried out by Frommer’s Unlimited and eDigitalResearch in March and April this year. More than half the respondents came from the UK. When asked about their bad experiences online, 52% said that major that travel sites were ‘confusing’, although the responses didn’t drill down into more detail about where the confusion lies. A similar percentage felt let down by a lack of images on travel sites. One-third of users revealed that they had received no response to emailed questions, suggesting that customer service remains an issue for travel web sites. Ignoring a pre-booking email could result in the sale being lost; ignorin

Consumers are not ready for social networking integrated with travel booking it emerged at Travolution Question Time earlier this week. While social media is being broadly used in the travel research stage an expert panel said the time was not right for the booking element. Tamara Heber-Percy, co-founder of boutique hotel specialist Mr & Mrs Smith , which has a partnership with Dopplr, said it was not at the stage of people booking. “We are looking at it with our affiliates to see what we can do but it does not seem to be the right time.” WAYN co-founder Jerome Touze said its attempts at integrating a booking facilities had not been as successful as hoped. “We have a community who are interested in where they are going next so we thought by plugging in a booking engine it would work but it was naïve because they don’t come to WAYN to

Track everything you do on social networks and don’t expect major financial return was the message from online experts earlier this week. A high-profile panel including Frommers Unlimited , Orange , Microsoft and Mr & Mrs Smith told the room to measure success on social media by more than just the return on investment. Mr&Mrs Smith co-founder Tamara Heber-Percy said it viewed its ROI as threefold – bookings, brand awareness and membership renewals. “It’s how much our new media is drawing in people who have never visited the site before and we have just started tracking membership renewals and we’re looking at re-engaging them on facebook or twitter.” Frommers Unlimited’s Joel Brandon-Bravo warned against just focusing on

A technology that aggregates social networks and user-generated content could be the next major development online said panellists at the Travolution Question Time. Those gathered at Tuesday’s event heard that a service connecting all the social networks consumers now subscribe to is needed because of the huge spread of social media sites. Frommers Unlimited ’s Joel Brandon-Bravo said a filtering system would also need to be built in to filter out the noise. Microsoft Advertising community manager Mel Carson described the holy-grail as a technology, which would not only aggregate these new technologies but provide value to marketers and consumers by capturing the desires and conversations of everyone interacting with each other. Others said developments such as Facebook Connect pointed to the way things would go.

Anite ’s travel technology business performed “reasonably well” in the year to end-April09 , with the results boosted by a one-off payment of £2.3m from Thomas Cook Group “in relation to the early settlement of a contract with MyTravel”. The contract was lost as a result of Thomas Cook’s takeover of MyTravel, which saw the former MyTravel businesses move away from Anite’s reservation system and services and onto the Thomas Cook platform. While the original contract seems to have been cancelled, Anite will continue to provide “a modified service” to Thomas Cook Group for another five years. Similarly, Anite also lost First Choice as a client as a result of its merger with TUI and the move of First Choice onto the Thomson reservation systems. “The loss of these two companies as clients will effect future revenues,” it acknowledged. Anite also provided the reservation systems for XL, the tour operator

Tourists driving between Melbourne and Adelaide often miss a fascinating area midway on their long journey - the Limestone Coast.

Camping at Sesriem campsite allows the visitor to Sossusvlei dunes to enter the park earlier than tourists staying outside the National Park.

On the occasion of the 30-year anniversary of the Sony Walkman BBC's The Magazine asked 13 year old Scott Campbell to trade his iPod for the original Sony Walkman for a week, which led to a (hilarious) review, including gems like this one:

[Via Nickbaum]

Rubén Sánchez de Lost in TV me avisa de la realización por parte de la empresa Factoria Crossmedia de un experimiento para llevar Twitter a la televisión o mejor dicho para usar este sistema de microblogging dentro de un programa de televisión convencional.

160 usuarios de twitter participaron enviando 300 mensajes con la palabra #nickdutnik de los cuales el 30% se publicaron en pantalla durante los 25 minutos de duración del programa ETB3. El objetivo era dar voz a los usuarios de Twitter para participar en el programa. Parece que es la primera experiencia de este tipo que se realiza en la televisión en España, es una utilidad que ya hemos visto en algunos eventos como Evento Blog que parece pueden tener bastante sentido también para llevarlo a Televisión usado como backchannel.

PR Park Cottage, Cumbria Photograph: PR

There are airports close to Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Groningen, Maastricht and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Airports in Belgium, France and Germany are close to Holland.