The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) is warning travellers that search engines are taking bookers to sites that look like the hotel’s direct or “official” site but are in fact clever copies of them.

Customers who the book find out when they get to their chosen hotel that they have in fact booked through a third party, paying an additional 25% booking fee. Some find that they have also paid for things they didn’t need, like an extra bed in the room, or disabled access, and others, who have tried to cancel have found it impossible to get their money back.

Management of London Luton airport say they are “disappointed” at the results of the Which? survey giving them a customer satisfaction score of 29%, with descriptions such as “chaos” and “a rip of”. The airport has been at the bottom of the Which? ranking for the last five years.

Top marks went to Doncaster Sheffield at 87%, with good scores achieved by London Southend at 84%, Norwich and Southampton both at 75% and Exeter at 71%. Joining Luton lower down was Manchester Terminal 1 at 50%, Aberdeen at 44%, Manchester Terminal 3 at 43% and London Stansted at 38%.

Organisers booking events at Bath University, or planning to, may like to know that they are helping Britain’s highest paid Vice-Chancellor and her well-paid team get even richer.

Dame Glynis Bakewell enjoyed a package worth £451,000 last year, including her free £1.6 million home in Bath, a fact that has prompted four MPs so far to leave the Court of Bath University in protest and call for her resignation. Her pay has been described as “unjustifiable” and “unfair” against the fact that “students take on a debt of £60,000 and spend 30 years of their working lives paying it off.”

Apparently 66 senior managers at the University are on six-figure salaries, with 13 trousering more than £150,000, facts that will doubtless inspire event organisers earning considerably less.

Given that Theresa May has announced war on the “abhorrent greed” of fat cat business types she might want to take on board that some of the young, developing minds at our universities are being set a bad example by Bakewell.

The modern Ely Cathedral Conference Centre offers one room for 80 theatre-style, divisible into two, two rooms for 30 and one for 20. All have free secure internet connection and upper rooms have lift access. There is a fully equipped kitchen area and free car parking nearby.

The Centre is adjacent to historic Ely’s impressive cathedral and close to Oliver Cromwell’s House. Inside the Cathedral is a unique Stained Glass Museum with more than 1,000 stained glass panels and windows illustrating more than 800 years of the art.

Tel: 01353 659668 Web: centre.elycathedral.org

The Academic Venue Showcase takes place on Wednesday October 11 at the Emirates Stadium, London.

Entry is free and a range of short 20-minute educational sessions are offered to visitors.

Web: academicvenueshow.co.uk

“Men cluster to me like moths around a flame, and if their wings burn I know I’m not to blame” So sang Marlene Dietrich, one of the screen’s first femme fatales in Josef Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, (1930), one of seven films he made with her.

Twenty three years later he revisited the theme of the lethal siren with his last, and reportedly favourite film, The Saga of Anatahan, based on a true story and charting the sad decline in morals and humanity of twelve Japanese male sailors shipwrecked off the tiny three mile by one mile rocky, jungle-covered island of Anatahan in June 1944 after their ship is sunk by American planes. Continue reading →

An extra film review for September and a personal tribute.

Film buffs, especially fans of comedy, will know that American comedian Jerry Lewis died on Sunday August 20 in Las Vegas, Nevada, age 91.#

He was also an actor, director, producer, screenwriter, singer, humanitarian and no bad dancer, playing in films, and on radio, television and stage, and all of his talents were showcased, for us, in the best film performance he ever gave, and he gave thousands. This was his 1963 film The Nutty Professor, and we say his because he co-wrote it, produced it, directed it and starred in it as Professor Julius Kelp, a shy, gormless, buck-toothed disaster area of a chemistry professor who got tired of being a pushed-around nonentity and hit on a potion that would, when drunk, turn him into something very different. Continue reading →