• Hong Kong Reducing Quarantine To Seven Days

    Jun 30, 2021

    Residents of Hong Kong are getting set for a major change to their travel arrangements in the coming months. The Hong Kong Government have announced that once fully vaccinated residents will only have to spend 7 days in quarantine after travelling internationally. The Government also added that those residents must take a COVID-19 test on arrival in addition to those quarantine arrangements. This move is widely seen as the first step to the removal of quarantine restrictions altogether and a test for how strong the country’s vaccination regime is. Problematically though at this time, the rules are only being applied… Read more »

  • Eateries To Be the Centrepiece Of Sydney’s New Quay Quarter

    Jun 30, 2021

    Woolloomooloo has been dominating Sydney’s culture scene in recent times with the newly opened Crown hotel and harbourside suburb featuring stacks and stacks of entertainment venues and some of the best hospitality Sydney has to offer. Yet other areas of the Sydney CBD look to take that mantle over in the coming year with Wynyard Station and MLC Centre both eyeing large scale revitalisation projects including retail and hospitality precincts with the aim to show the Crown precinct up at its own game. Most recently though and close to Circular Quay, the Quay Quarter is looking to finish the job… Read more »

  • Free Travel Being Offered To Vaccinated Australians

    Jun 30, 2021

    While Governments worldwide are fast-tracking their population’s road to vaccination, some of Australia’s biggest private companies are coming up with their own strategy to encourage the greater population to vaccinate themselves. Virgin Australia has been the latest company to put their hand up to rescue Australia’s vaccine effort with the airline creating the aptly named VA-X & Win promotion. Virgin Australia looks set to offer millions of frequent flyer points and business class flights as prizes to customers, and the only catch is you need to be fully vaccinated to enter. Virgin looks to add even more prizes to that… Read more »

  • Staycations Are Becoming A Genuine Thing

    Jun 30, 2021

    It’s funny, for the longest of times staycations were to a point considered taboo. Not that this should govern anyone’s life, but the staycation almost felt like a poor excuse of a holiday concocted by a boyfriend who’d prefer to spend all his cookies on golf equipment or video games. Since the COVID19 pandemic, on the other hand, staycations have been booming. The idea of getting away in your own city for a weekend and rediscovering things you forgot existed in the place you live has become more and more exciting. The more surprising thing though is that new Victorian… Read more »

  • Despite COVID19 QANTAS Is Lean, Mean And Ready To See The Green

    Jun 30, 2021

    Alan Joyce has never really been a quitter. He’s also never been one for ignoring looming problems. A trait which was spoken to last January when while Coronavirus was a figment of most of our imaginations, Joyce was already planning for battle. The estimated global loss of the airline industry since the beginning of the pandemic is upwards of $174billion. A figure which could topple some smaller nations and buy others. That loss figure is so profoundly huge that in some cases it has wiped decades of profits off the board. The bigger loss for airlines to come out of… Read more »

  • New Zealand Travel Bubble In Tumultuous Times

    Jun 30, 2021

    Coronavirus seems to be that niggling pain that just won’t go away. You know the pain. The one that your son or partner keeps telling you to go to the physio for a diagnosis for. The one that you claim will go away with a bit of rest. That pain is certainly being felt by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern this week. After having to pause New Zealand’s travel bubble with Victoria almost a month ago thanks to an outbreak of the Indian delta-variant of Coronavirus, New Zealand have announced that they will have to pause the bubble with… Read more »

  • Why Airbnb was so Successful in Competing with Bigger Hotel Chains?

    Apr 23, 2021

    Classically hotel chains have been dominant in the accommodation provider segment of tourism and travel. Hotel chains such as Accor Hotels and the Hyatt Group spend large amounts of cash on marketing nationwide such as Accor’s most recent Subaru/Accor Plus membership offer. But problematically those bigger hotel chains do not own large amounts of their networks. They franchise them out. This is not what was causing a large-scale movement away from the classic hotel booking before COVID19. It was by-in-large a stagnation of offerings by those groups to compete with the cost-focus strategy with which online services such as Airbnb… Read more »

  • Australians Are Returning to Sporting Events in a Big Way

    Apr 23, 2021

    2021 and sports got off to cough and splutter start with the Australian Grand Prix (held in Melbourne) getting rescheduled to November and the initial AFL rounds experiencing problems with state-based COVID-19 zoning excluding travellers from grounds once they’d already arrived at the location. As 2021 has progressed though it’s started to look like Australian sport is stronger than ever. Reports have claimed that the current average attendance at the MCG is 40,000 compared to 53,000 in 2019 (a drop that is as a result of crowd caps at the football). But the crowd numbers are far more consistent than… Read more »

  • Inner-city Australian Populations Are Migrating North

    Apr 23, 2021

    New data released by the Australian Government is showing that inner-city Australians are looking for warmer states with bigger backyards. Victoria’s migration rate during 2019-2020 dropped for the first time in almost a decade while Queensland’s migration rate rose significantly. Queensland growth centres identified in the study included the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Cairns. The Australian Government claims that this population migration is temporary and that most of the population movement was caused by COVID-19 but consumer attitude studies are showing different stories. One of the proclaimed reasons for population movement in a qualitative study done to delve into… Read more »

  • Air New Zealand Are Status Matching QANTAS

    Apr 23, 2021

    With the New Zealand travel bubble well in force, airlines have turned to what they can do to encourage travellers to sit back in an airline seat to head away for their holiday. One of the areas which airlines are looking at is status matching for frequent flyer programs. Air New Zealand and QANTAS had already thought of this with the two airlines offering respective “Touch of Gold” (Air New Zealand) and “Status Fast Track” (QANTAS) promotions. Basically, in the case of QANTAS and until July 31 if you are a Gold status frequent flyer with any of 16 airlines… Read more »