I know it sounds crazy, but you may already be too late to book your Christmas holiday

Travel reservations for the rest of the year are going bonkers. We are already seeing many of the best resorts for the Christmas holidays booked up. If you are planning to take a family vacation during the holidays, you better get going soon. As you have also probably read the prices this Christmas are also higher than the moon. Add to that, some of the top properties have a 7-night minimum, and some have even moved to a 10-night minimum. Oh how different things are from a year ago.

Everybody wants to buy Spirit Airlines – Frontier wants to buy them and now JetBlue is making a hostile bid to buy them. Clearly, one of these two will capture the prize and we will most likely not have a Spirit Airlines next year. The loser from this battle is the consumer as we will have one less low-fare airline to compete with and keep airfares low.

The great merger of business and leisure travel is happening fast in our new post-COVID world – For the last decade, many people in the industry used the term “bleisure” to describe how younger travelers were combining their business trips and extending them into a leisure trip at the tail end.  Before the pandemic, some had estimated upwards of 20% of travel to certain destinations was “bleisure travel”  A recent speech by an American Airlines executive mentioned that today over 50% of flights on AA are trips that blend business travel with vacation travel. CLICK HERE for a great article about this phenomenon.

Airlines schedule changes this spring are making travel this summer a madhouse – The airlines are struggling to find enough staff and planes to fill their schedules to meet the massive tidal wave of demand for travel this summer. During the last 90 days, most of the major airlines have made dramatic cuts to their schedules to deal with shortages of staff and planes. This has resulted in a massive amount of schedule changes that are turning into nightmares for travelers. We are seeing things like 8-hour layovers on connecting flights and schedules changes that result in routings through a different airline hub as the original flights no longer exist. Your best bet is to work with a friendly travel advisor who can help you fight the battles with the airline to find you the best value and schedules.

I am officially declaring that the old-fashioned, germy handshake is back in vogue – Interacting with people during the pandemic has been awkward. Do I greet people with an elbow or a fist bump or nothing at all? Having attended several travel shows and meetings this year, I can officially say that the handshake is back, full throttle. I must admit I have been taught all my life that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they offer a strong but warm handshake while at the same time looking directly into your eyes. Often that first 5 seconds tells me if I can trust a person or not. CLICK HERE to read more.