Travel Guide Helps Women Plan Trips
“Planning is everything,” says the “Travel Guide for Women,” a brochure from American Express Travelers Cheques, which covers topics ranging from money matters to safe solo travel to meeting people.
For a copy, write to American Express Travelers Cheques Guide for Women, Dept. SB, 8th Floor, 307 W. 36th St., New York, NY 10018.
On the air: It’s easy to see celebrities at the Sheraton New York. That’s because “The Broadway Hour,” a weekly radio show, is taped live from the Manhattan hotel’s Lobby Court Lounge every Thursday at 4 p.m.
Live entertainment and interviews with present and future stars of Broadway and offBroadway are featured.
Big boats: Here are the 10 largest ships (passenger numbers in parentheses) currently in service:
1. Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s Majesty of the Seas (2,744)
1. RCCL’s Monarch of the Seas(2,744)
3. Carnival Cruise’s Fantasy (2,634)
4. Carnival’s Ecstasy (2,594)
4. Carnival’s Fascination (2,594)
4. Carnival’s Sensation (2,594)
7. Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norway (2,585)
8. RCCL’s Sovereign of the Seas (2,524)
9. Cunard’s QE2 (1,810)
10. RCCL’s Nordic Empress (1,610)
Smoke signals: Even the imaginative Mark Twain would have a hard time believing this one.
The American Queen, a big new paddleboat that will begin rollin’ down the river this summer, has stacks and a pilot house so high that they will have to be lowered by hydraulic elevator to pass under some bridges.
Finishing touches are now being put on the $65 million steamboat scheduled to begin service in June with the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., the same company whose Delta Queen and the Mississippi Queen have been plying the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers for decades.
The inaugural cruise for the steamship, which is being completed in Louisiana, will depart from Pittsburgh on June 27.
The ship has 82-foot-high smokestacks and reaches 418 feet stem to stern (that’s 1.4 football fields, for those who crave that measuring stick). It’s 90 feet wide and has six decks. The paddlewheel weighs in at 60 tons.
Mark Twain would probably gasp at today’s cruise prices, too. Inaugural trips start at $790 per person, double occupancy, for a three-night cruise, and the fare for seven nights in a “B” cabin is $2,780 per person.
Safer skies: Aeroflot, the Russian airline whose surliness was legendary during its days as the Soviet national carrier, is trying to mend its reputation - and going after regional airlines that misleadingly bear its name.
According to Travel Weekly, some of the 300 regional airlines formed when the Soviet Union broke up never took the Aeroflot name off the aircraft that formerly belonged to the national airline.
Aeroflot has since changed its full name to Aeroflot Russian International Airlines and has worked to improve its service. But many of the regional carriers are regarded as unsafe and unregulated.