Mark Vanhoenacker, on the experience of arriving in the US. "Tourism promotion is common sense. But we might reconsider the wisdom of requiring travelers to subsidize it in exchange for a grilling about their sexual health and genocidal activities." "Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime."

"If you’d like to know what goes on beyond the cockpit door so you can better understand go-arounds and take the maneuver in stride like a seasoned traveler rather than as one who doesn’t fly much– read on."

"Dutch researchers Christiaan Behrens and Eric Pels analyze the passenger market between London and Paris from 2003 through 2009. The primary competitors in this corridor are conventional air carriers like Air France and British Airways, low-cost carriers like easyJet, and the Eurostar high-speed rail service. Over the course of the study — which looked at roughly 9,500 business and 18,000 leisure trips — the Eurostar has been far and away the dominant travel choice."

"I had wanted to do some thinking about why I so often prefer to stay in a hotel room when travelling – even to cities where I have many friends with room to spare." On the varied (and hard to get right) charms of hotels.

Jon Ronson on cruise ship disappearances in general and the case of Rebecca Coriam's apparent death on a Disney ship in particular.

Hung on the hook of the UK showing of Pan Am, an article on cabin crew, then and now. Worryingly little has changed.

"A recent trip had me in London for four days, and I thought, [what if] I started from the outside and worked my way in? Since Heathrow is right at the edge of Greater London, it made perfect sense just to land, clear customs, and start walking." Eighteen miles from Heathrow to the City.

A must-read interview with Greg Lindsay, author of Aerotropolis, a book that argues - if the interview is anything to go by, persuasively - that the cities of the 21st century will be designed around airports.

Subtitled "a Travel bag by Britta Gustafson", this is a pretty good list of things for me to do. (I've visited the transit museum before, but I had a rubbish camera, and it was years ago, so I'm happy to go back.)

As someone who has travelled long distances by train at least six times, I have some advice that perhaps you will find useful. A series of fourteen train tips follows.

"New York / London / San Francisco 2010 is a self-initiated publication documenting my travel during 2010. The aim was to communicate my experiences to others by outlining my daily activities and exhibiting my photography." Looks interesting (particularly the map design and the London photos).

"How does one write about a neighborhood that is not a neighbourhood? A neighbourhood still so much under construction one cannot even use that well-worn phrase “not so much a neighbourhood as a state of mind” (“not of an age but for all time”?) to describe it?" A wonderful little piece on the area of Berlin around the central station.

"BAA said it had handled 7.2 million passengers at its six UK airports in December, down 10.9% from a year ago." Also, Virgin Atlantic is witholding fees because of the "slow reaction" to snow. Fun times.

"International train travel has always had a romantic appeal." On travelling halfway around the world by train.

"I don’t love trains because they teach me about America. I don’t love them because they connect me with a country I have never known. I love them because they disconnect me from everything else. When the train pulls out of the station, it’s like a plug being yanked from a socket."

"I was also aware that dumping them en masse into Flickr wasn’t going to be an interesting way of conveying what I was up to all summer. So I published a magazine instead." This is something I need to do.

'The paper, "Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries using Social Breadcrumbs" (PDF), cleverly uses the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels. Then, they combine all those past trails to generate high quality itineraries for future tourists that tell them what to see, where to go, how long to expect to spend at each sight, and how long to allow for travel times between the sights.'

"Mobile and web information should be available by the beginning of 2011, and the roll out of new Countdown signs will begin a few months later." Seems annoyingly slow.

'Started in March by Lyon’s urban regional authority, the tour spotlights four avant-garde housing projects and one priory, all within easy reach of central Lyon. Along the way, it traces “the development of a new language in architecture,” said Gilles Ragot'

"With this unique traveler's guide, you'll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now."

Generalises the time travel map and lets you make queries that let you find local minima.

An overlaid tube map for London (and other transit options elsewhere) is now available on Google Maps.

"So I have to give up significant amounts of personal data, and have no ‘expectation of privacy’. Makes me think twice about whether going to the US is even worth it."

Since the BBC don't link to the ESTA site, needed to get a visa waiver for travel to (or through) the US at least 72 hours before your flight, allow me. Let me also warn you about the huge alert that pops up, the lack of an http to https redirect, and the awful session tracking in URLs. (My pleasure.) (I'll also need this myself, sooner or later.)

Apply for a visa waiver at least 72 hours before travel, online, or you're not getting US entry. "Esta is free but [Frances Tuke, from Abta] warned that searches for Esta online brought up numerous websites offering to process the application in return for personal details and a fee." So BBC News have it as a Related Link? No, of course they don't.

Visiting all the lighthouses in Scotland. There's plenty in England and Wales too (run by a different authority) to visit as well.

It's a good thing I don't fly in Europe much, and that this won't work over the Atlantic. Now, if they'd allowed SMSes only, I'd probably be OK with it.

Insane. British Airways plan to launch a twice-daily business-class only direct service from London City Airport to New York, using Airbus A318s. They must be pushing the edge of the range, and it's bound to be horribly expensive.

I hope it does, even if there are Tory idiots in Barnet handing out leaflets campaigning against it. Mind you, it's not even a plan yet, being confined to a "vision document" and being well over a decade away.

The US seems determined to make it almost impossible to travel there. Why not just end the visa waiver programme and make it clear foreigners aren't welcome any more?

The home for all of TfL's design documents, including the LU signs manual that I love so much, but also newer things like the Overground signs standards.

"It was fanastic. In literally less than 3 minutes, I'd gone from frantic about making my flight to all the way to the metal detector" "anybody who's a privacy zealot is not gonna be able to get behind the whole Clear thing."

I've known you can take container ships for a while (it's surprisingly expensive, mind you), but I didn't realise you could take them from Hamburg (and Rotterdam) to Iceland. Nice photos and writing.

Jonathan Glancey on the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras; he likes it. "Quality abounds in this extraordinary public space. Rich, scratch-proof timber floors here. Stone flagstones there. No carpets. No McDonald's."

Guardian story covering the Global TGI survey that reports Britons per capita emissions are twice those of the US. Overall, though, US travel emissions are double those of the UK. Interesting.

I was wondering how long it took a container ship to get from Japan to the West Coast these days. The answer is "about ten days".

Looks like Dopplr has some competition. Not sure I'd trust people with confirmation emails. I wonder if the maps and weather work outside the US, too.

Appeal Court overturns the High Court's decision two to one, and say that Critical Mass must give notice of their route before it's allowed.

The Observer's review of the harbour crane you can stay at in the Netherlands.

A harbour crane and lighthouse in the Netherlands that you can stay at/in.

Thanks, Carrie Frais, for putting your standard of living above concerns like carbon emissions and noise. Nice to see the BBC going a long way to find their example person too (she works for, er, the BBC).

Wonderfully geeky. I particular like Image 108: Photostop Only

"Subway stations are not attributes; Navteq honors the primacy of the automobile" Satellite navigation (is that a British term only?) in a historical context