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9 July, 2010

Good morning

I hope you had a wonderful 4 July weekend.  Summer has certainly arrived - too much so on the East coast, and in a perfect amount here in Seattle.

It has been a productive week, with a new design for the website now starting to filter onto the site.  Currently there are only about 12 pages with the new format, but the amazing thing is these twelve pages represent almost half of all the website visits each month.  There are another 1000 or more pages of content that share the remaining 50% between them - I guess that is what the phrase 'the long tail of the internet' means.

I'm even starting up a Facebook page as well, although there's nothing other than a few pictures of the Scotland tour last month on it at present.

I'll let you know when there are more than 12 new pages to admire.

One more opening comment.  As you'll recall, Seabourn has kindly been a prominent supporter/sponsor of The Travel Insider recently, and so it was good to see this article about the maiden sailing of Seabourn's latest ship, the Sojourn.

Half the passengers booked another sailing before the end of the first sailing - now that's the sort of endorsement that other cruise lines would give their eye teeth for.

Talking about touring, please remember the next two Travel Insider Tours :

2010 Christmas Markets Rhine River Cruise - A one week cruise from Basel to Amsterdam, 3 - 10 December, with options before and after.

2011 Scotland's Islands & Highlands Tour - An 11 day tour from Glasgow, through the islands and highlands, and back to Edinburgh or Glasgow, 13 - 23 June, with options before and after.

After its debut mention last week, we've already had one couple sign up for the Scottish tour, and the Rhine River Christmas cruise is filling steadily.  Come for one, or come for both.

The email service developer hopes that next week we'll have migrated to the new email format, so perhaps this might be the final newsletter in the form that has lasted almost nine years.  We'll see.

For now, the rest of this week's newsletter can be found by clicking here and reading down from the top.  Note that if you click this link in more than a day or so, new blog entries subsequent to the 'newsletter' entries will now be at the top, but hopefully they'll be of interest too, and simply page down to get to the items you want.

Two thoughts to close this week.  First, if you were already a blog reader, you would have been one of the very first people in the US on Thursday morning to learn of a special airfare sale by Virgin America that was only available until 5pm Thursday.  My breaking story was top of Google within 15 minutes of being published, and you too could have been one of the very first to benefit from this early notice of a very short air fare.

Lastly this week, it isn't exactly pennies from heaven; it was more like 2.5 million Euros from an overturned truck.  But welcome all the same for those people fortunate enough to be following it.

Until next week, please enjoy safe travels, and if trucks should overturn in front of you, let's hope that any golden shower you experience may be money rather than something else

David M Rowell aka The Travel Insider

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