Up Front With Martin B. Deutsch for 2000

December 18: A CRYSTAL-CLEAR VISION
At most, the luxury cruise market accounts for maybe 10 percent of the industry’s capacity. And you might well provoke an argument about which cruise lines belong in this exalted category. There are at least four that fit the basic requirements of excellence in service, dining and accommodations. And just about everyone I know with an opinion seems to agree that Crystal Cruises is either at or very near the top.

November 13: A TALE OF TWO AIRLINES
The merger mania. The consolidation craze. They sound like dances — and, in a sense, they are, since the players in these dramas are kept shifting and shuffling, often with little or no control. Or a familiar face or figure will surface in a different guise. I had these somewhat surrealistic thoughts after a recent get-together with John Lindekens, vice president of alliances at Swissair and Sabena. Lindekens is philosophical about his assignment. “You’re only as good as your alliances,” he says. “You need a friendly network to tie into.”

October 30: CRUISE VIEWS FROM A LEGEND
Warren Titus and his achievements would fill a page or two in Who's Who. A towering figure in the cruise industry for more than 40 years, Titus is busy shuttling between San Francisco and Miami in his current capacity as chairman and vice president of Seabourn Club and Cunard World Club.

August 21: RENAISSANCE AT KOREAN AIR
Korean Air is the passenger arm of the Hanjin Group, a major Seoul-based transportation conglomerate. The airline is hardly a candidate for the endangered species list--Korean flies 107 relatively "young" jets to 77 cities in 29 countries--but it needs to move aggressively to overcome operations and image problems.

July 31: DECISIVE DECADES FOR AGENTS
Forget about the Big Picture for a moment. Give the incomprehensible cosmic eons a pass. Any which way you look at it, in human terms, 70 years is a long time--a lifetime--and Travel Agent magazine has weathered these eventful decades with dignity and credibility.

July 17: RX: A PHYSICIAN FOR THE TRAVELER
It's neither surprising nor illogical to find a few hardy members of the medical fraternity honing in on travel. This development is undeniably good news for agents as well as their clients, and its emergence certainly deserves closer examination. One example: Scott Kalish, a major player in emergency medicine at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital for 16 years before going out on his own this month with the Center for Travelers’ Health and Immunizations.

June 19: ISRAEL AND THE PEACE PROCESS
You have to applaud a positive attitude. So here’s Arie Sommer, Israel’s commissioner for tourism in North America, who sees peace breaking out in the Middle East sooner rather than later, a development that would significantly grow tourism to that historic crucible of what we consider civilization.

February 21: THE MILLENNIUM AT SEA
Where did you spend the millennium New Year’s Eve, probably the most ballyhooed nonevent of the last thousand years, give or take a few Super Bowls and world heavyweight prize fights? My wife and I, we were at sea. We were comfortably and serenely ensconced on the Norwegian Wind, at least a thousand miles from Times Square, heading south in the Caribbean for Cancun from Miami, as far from our West Side apartment in Manhattan as we wanted to be.

February 7: SOUTH AFRICAN RENAISSANCE
Mohammed Valli Moosa is the minister of environmental affairs and tourism for South Africa’s new regime under President Thabo Mbeki. He came to the U.S. for the first time in 1984 as an “anti-apartheid campaigner,” but this time he came to America on a different mission: “We haven’t scratched the surface [of tourism] in this country,” Moosa said.

January 17: A ROUTE TO (SMALL) RICHES
China Southern Airlines flies Boeing 777 aircraft between Los Angeles and Guangzhou (Canton) four times a week. It also connects 65 cities within China, making it the largest domestic carrier in terms of communities served. It has carried more than 15 million passengers in each of the last two years, more than double the count of any other Chinese airline. China Southern also flies to 20 Asian destinations and Amsterdam.

Copyright © 1992-2007 by Martin B. Deutsch. All rights reserved.