March has been and gone and it’s time to take a look back at what’s been buzzing in the travel industry so far this spring. What with more preparations for the World Cup getting underway in Brazil, Sotheby’s auction of a significant haul of travel books and a surprise message in a bottle for one Bahamas-based couple, it’s been a busy month! Read on to find out more…
Seat Boost for Brazil
A pair of South American airlines have added over a 1000 new flights to meet growing demand for those hoping to travel to this summer’s Football World Cup in Brazil. Airlines LAN and TAM have launched over 300 additional international flights, many of them departing from the UK, plus over 7,000 internal flights to help passengers travel around the continent in preparation for the tournament which kicks off in June.
This news follows the recent announcement by Brazilian Sports Minister Aldo Rebelo that no-fly zones set up over the games’ 12 stadiums for security reasons will mean that hundreds of flights will need to be re-routed. Rebelo also predicted that the price of flights and hotel rooms would now start to fall with room occupancy rates currently at around 90%. Some 600,000 fans are expected to travel to the samba nation, so there’s still time to get your maracas shaking.
Travel Tomes Auction
The world’s biggest collection of books about travel and discovery is going under the hammer. Sotheby’s are auctioning off the collection of 15,000 items which include Australia’s oldest printed map and the first book printed on the Antarctic, along with thousands of titles documenting the travels of Captain Cook, Drake, Shackleton, Raleigh and many other legendary explorers. The collection, estimated to be worth over £5m, was amassed by collector Franklin Brooke Hitching over a 40 year period and will be sold off in a series of auctions from now until late 2015. Plenty of time to bag some travel bragging rights for your book shelf!
Glad Tidings
A school student from New York got a nice surprise when his message in a bottle managed to wash up on a private beach in the Bahamas some three years later. Connor Corbett Rice cast his ship from the shores of Shelter Island, New York, in 2011 for a school project designed to teach students about ocean currents, under the tutelage of teacher Jack Reardon.
Reardon was gobsmacked to hear that the message had travelled so far, believing that such an occurrence was virtually impossible due to the nature of ocean currents. Rhode Island was the farthest any of his classes’ ships had reached in 9 years of running the science experiment.
The vessel was discovered by residents Andrew and Carol Gracie who found it while strolling on a deserted stretch of beach and soon fired off an email reply to the student and teacher. Many beaches in the Bahamas are known for their collections of sea glass, including the beach where the film Jaws was set.
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