The Travel Group

Did you know that as soon as you venture outside of the province, you can't rely solely on your provincial health plan to completely cover your emergency medical expenses?  Each province maintains its own pricing schedule which outlines precisely what treatments it will cover and how much.  These items vary from province to province; and more worringly there are price caps on each treatment.  Often people who need medical treatment outside their own province find themselves stuck with part of the bill!

Many people take on this risk - either knowingly or more often...

So, you are very proud of yourself.  You're travel consultant keeps recommending that you check-in online 24 hours ahead of your flights, and finally you remember to do this!  Then... you get to the last step and the airline tells you it is unable to issue the boarding pass.

What's up?

If you are travelling into or out of the USA, what has almost definitely happened is this: you have been randomly selected for additional scrutiny at the airport.  US Homeland Security randomly selects passengers for additional document screening by the airline.  The...

Check out your frequent-flyer programs for unusual and unique gift ideas.

Bearing in mind that it is wise to ensure you are getting good value for your frequent flyer miles (see article "The Mathematics of Points"), you may notice that loyalty programs are expanding their rewards to use some pretty creative alternatives to airline travel.  One of these is Aeroplan's Schokolade Cafe (in east Vancouver), which for 5,000 Aeroplan points will offer a chocolate-making class held once a month exclusively for Aeroplan members.  Sounds like a very cool gift?

Congrats to our 2012 Photo Contest Winners. 

Best Caption goes to Gary Lachman.

Most odd/interesting submission - Lynda McGrath

Best Photo - Jane Fontein

Each year, The Travel Group challenges our staff, clients, and suppliers to submit a photo (or two or three) in our social networked photo contest.  Rules are laughably simple, prizes are great, and the voting is wide open to anyone!

People used to ask all the time, "How does the Internet affect travel agents?" I've always said the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to our industry.  It supplies us with endless tools for research; and, while some are accessible only to travel professionals, many are pretty cool public sites.

Here's a random list of some of the coolest or most useful sites that you too should know and use:

1. The Bed Bug Registry: learn where those bed bugs are, so that you can avoid them!  If you read the news...

Now that smart phones have taken over the world, we need to devise stratagies for using them when on the road, particularly when you are outside of Canada/USA, where one wrong move can land you with a $500+ phone bill when you get home!

Traveling with smart phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices is the greatest thing.  You can now easily look up the phone number or address of that restaurant you meant to reserve before you left town, or plot out where exactly you are within that maze of streets in Venice, or decipher a QR code on an item in a boutique.  But,...