7 Days, 7 Travel Stories

1. About $6 out of every $10 spent on weekend travel was purchased online versus less than $3 out of every $10 for a weeklong vacation, according to a report by PhoCusWright. A three-night stay away from home is now the most popular type of leisure travel. Of those who buy travel online, almost two-thirds say that general search engines influence where they purchase their travel and what they book. 7 in 10 online travelers indicated that it is a Web site's use of video, pictures and online maps that most influence their method of purchase. TW

2. A new site, http://www.tripology.com/, helps travelers find a travel agent with the expertise for the destination they plan to travel. Simply fill out a trip request form online with your special needs and up to three travel agents with expertise in your areas of interest will contact you by phone or e-mail. Chicago Tribune

3. Rising housing costs and an appreciating ruble made Moscow the world's most expensive city for the second year in a row and nearly 35 percent higher than New York, which served as the base city for the survey. Living in London is 26 percent more expensive than New York. Seoul and Tokyo were the third and fourth most expensive cities. In Moscow, a luxury two-bedroom apartment will cost an expat $4,000 a month; a CD rings up at $24.83; one copy of an international daily newspaper is $6.30; and a fast-food hamburger meal totals $4.80. The least expensive city for the fifth year in a row was Paraguay's capital of Asuncion, where the cost of living is half that of New York. The study was conducted by Mercer. Human Resource Consulting. AP

4. Several thousand Italian tourism Web sites have been infected by software that secretly installs so-called trojan software that takes control of a visitor’s computer and records information entered into the computer -- including credit card numbers and other personal data. Computer security firm Micro Trend said it detected more than 4,500 travel sites in Italy that have been infected. The trail of data leads to a server located in Chicago. Computer users are only vulnerable to the attack if they are not using up to date versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Updates are available at http://www.microsoft.com/. The attack, which Trend Micro first detected last Friday, was engineered using hacking software sold in Russia that costs around $700. ETN

5. After decades of relying on telephones to book tables, the restaurant business has finally gone unabashedly high-tech. Some 7,000 high-end restaurants around the world now use http://www.opentable.com/ to let patrons make reservations. The reservations that eventually pop-up on the restaurant's computer also reveal personal tibits of intormation about the guest that can be used to make the dinner even more satisfying. OpenTable, which started in 1999, did not take off right away. At the time few restaurant owners could see the advantage of paying a dollar per dinner to an Internet company. But the company deployed an aggressive sales force and persuaded owners that dining reservations would eventually go the way of hotel and airline reservations. NY Times

6. Fare tracking site http://www.farecompar.com/ said that the lowest airfares have dropped 8% and 15% this summer from one year ago. Observers also noted that demand on some routes has slipped a little. Wall Street Journal

7. Paris awakening...After four days of deal-making at the Paris Air Show, Airbus appears to have booked enough orders to move ahead of rival Boeing in the sales race this year. Airbus sold less than half as many planes as Boeing over the first five months of the year, but a characteristic surge on its home turf at Le Bourget may have put it ahead. Airbus has taken 405 firm plane orders at the show so far, plus another 250 or so looser sale agreements. Year to date puts Airbus orders over 600.

Boeing had a quieter time in Paris, with only 66 new firm orders announced, and a similar number of existing orders identified. The air show tally plus a few other recent deals would put Boeing at around 500 sales for the year. Boeing holds the record for most sales in a year, 1,044 in the year 2000. Airwise

Extra Reading...Volunteers wanted for a simulated flight to Mars. The European Space Agency seeks 12 volunteers to go on a 520-day simulated mission to the red planet. Candidates must be citizens of one of 15 European countries or Canada, be highly motivated and speak English and Russian. They must also contend with extreme isolation and confinement. Accommodations feature a 30 square-foot room for each crew member, a kitchen-dining room, living room and only one toilet for the group. Food will be carefully rationed. Smoking and drinking are not allowed. AP

Rich’s Weekend Reader is published by AndTyler222. All rights reserved. Information from various sources and mostly rewritten. andtyler222@verizon.net