Arthur's Blog: A News Round-Up and Mid-Summer Reflections on Travel

The news that a Florida law firm has brought a class action suit against Spirit Airlines has caused a great many consumer advocates to smile.  For several years now, they've been complaining that Spirit's aggressive creation of novel fees and expenses has gone too far, essentially preventing the public from realizing how high that budget airline has raised its fares. The Florida plaintiffs are complaining that Spirit left the mistaken impression that certain of its "user fees" were required by federal law; in reality, alleges the lawsuit, these fees were a purely voluntary creation of Spirit and had nothing to do with government regulations. We'll all watch with interest the outcome of what is bound to be a hotly-contested litigation.

I wrote yesterday about the decision of Celebrity Cruises to permit a cruise broker to charge as little as $43 a day for a 15-day "repositioning cruise" of one of its ships across the Atlantic, from England to Florida; and I called that rate "historic" for a ship of Celebrity's calibre. There are, of course, other dirt-cheap repositioning cruises scheduled for this autumn at less than $43 a day, but on standard vessels of Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian and MSC. It is the high quality of Celebrity's Constellation (the ship in question) that makes $43 so remarkable.

If you were to ask an experienced cruise passenger to identify the cruiselines that cater most to mature and elderly passengers, they'd answer in a flash that the ships of Holland America fit that bill. My daughter, in a blog post published last week in the Toronto Star, points out that the super-deluxe and so-called "premium" ships are also the vessels favored by super-annuated people -- ships like those of Seabourn, Regent, Seven Seas. Sedate river cruises are next in line. And which ships do younger passengers favor? According to Pauline, they like short cruises of almost any standard line going to the Bahamas and the Caribbean, or cruises scheduled for college breaks.

I was in England just prior to, and during the first several days of, the Olympics, and experienced the marvelous weather that spread over the British Isles at that time, a succession of sunshiny, rain-lacking days that you too seldom see there. The heavens created such a perfect background for television coverage that Britain must surely enjoy an upsurge in its tourism in the weeks ahead. And what was also unusual at that time, as pointed out to me by a colleague, was that Londoners were actually talking to one another. They were so hyped by the success of the games that they became more like Frenchmen than Brits. We'll see if that atmosphere carries over to the Fall.

In both Oxford and Bath, where I spent the stay, I was constantly impressed by the central locations and excellent amenities of the low-cost Travelodges in those cities. Travelodge in Britain (which has no connection to the Travelodge chain in the States) is an extraordinary budget find, charging rarely more than the equivalent of $60 a night for a double room -- an excellent rate for that often pricey nation. New Travelodge hotels are constantly springing up in other British cities (including London), and might be tops on your list for your own next trip to Britain. Incidentally, savoring brewed tea with scones (and strawberry jam) is a particular delight of visiting the occasional coffee shop in Britain; the experience reminds you of how much we have lost by making do with teabags in place of the arduous procedures of preparing a real cup of brewed tea.

They have just issued the catalogue of one-week courses for the Oxford Experience in July and August of 2013, and the course titles make me yearn to return. For one exciting week, you can sit in the living room of an Oxford don, in the medieval college created by Cardinal Wolsey and Henry the Eighth, and study the following: "The Beatles: Popular Music and Sixties Britain," or "The Age of Churchill," "British Spies in Fact and Fiction," "An Introduction to Particle Physics," "From Rasputin to Putin -- The Russian Enigma," or many more. Each week of a six week program features 11 totally different subjects, for which the one-week tab (covering everything other than your airfare to Britain) is about $1,800 per person, including wine with three of your 18 meals, comfortable rooms, afternoon excursions, and additional evening lectures on general subjects. Look up the "Oxford Experience."