Viator Travel Blog

My latest trip to Paris showed me a whole new side to the City of Lights, one that takes a little digging but is well rewarded. Three words: Rock. And. Roll. First up is the darker side of rock ‘n’ roll Paris. I attended the opening of the Charles Peterson photography exhibition: ‘Kurt Cobain About a Son’, in Galerie Chappe, a converted corner shop in the 18th, precariously perched on rue Andre Barsacq, a street on the steep hill close to Sacré-Coeur.

The global slowdown? Some destinations have grown in appeal for travellers looking to beat the ‘credit crunch’. The most prominent of these is the mysterious mid-Atlantic island of Iceland , whose economy suffered a massive crash in the autumn of 2008, literally halving the value of the Icelandic currency, the Krone. It’s not like travelers needed an extra excuse to visit this enticing land of fire, ice and natural wonders.

We’ve been busy updating our travel photo sets over on Flickr – have a look if you’re not familiar with them. And it made me realize how many drop-dead stunning photos have been submitted by Viator travelers recently. So we’ve selected some of the staff’s favorite tours and things to do in Viator, and posted a handful of our favorite traveler photos along with them. Have a gander.

This time last year I posted a list of the top and bottom searches of 2007 that occurred on Viator.com, and in keeping with this new tradition, I’ve updated the list for 2008. The Viator.com search box gained a ton of searches over 2007′s total – we had more than 1.35 million searches in 2008! [...]

I was in Hawaii last week, on the island of Oahu, and took the chance to personally check out the Oahu Shark Dive we offer.You know, sharks. In a cage. Under the water. Yeah, sounded pretty good I thought.

For a week-long cruise a couple could easily spend the cost of their Caribbean cruise all over again in shore excursion fees. The cruise lines charge a premium for shore excursions – and you can save time and money by not booking the tour through the cruise line. Avoiding the hoards of passengers being organized into the cruise line shore excursions and having a smaller group experience leaves more time for fun, which is why you’re in the Caribbean in the first place. Which is why Viator offers shore excursions in Aruba, the Bahamas, Barbados, British Virgin Islands (BVI), Cayman Islands, Dominica, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, St Lucia, St Maarten and US Virgin Islands.

When I was 11 years old (nearly 20 years ago), in May of 1989, I took my first tour to Alcatraz Island. My elementary school was a two-hour drive from San Francisco, and this was our big field trip of the year, Alcatraz and the San Francisco Zoo. In retrospect I think that part of the reason we went to Alcatraz and not say, an art museum, was perhaps meant as a cautionary tale.

Editor’s Note: We ran across the site whereivebeen.com a few months ago, and were impressed. So we asked Katy Lynch, the community manager at WIB, to answer a few questions about the site. She was kind enough to reply. Viator: So what’s the deal with whereivebeen.com? Whereivebeen.com:  Our site is all about finding places locally, [...]

While some people head for the hills, others hit the bars, and some prefer museums, stargazing or visiting the wildebeest, for me the ultimate holiday involves crashing waves and glistening sands. That’s right, I can never go past a trip to the beach. It started with Elvis and clambakes, in all those 1950s musicals with pretty girls in polka-dot bikinis and beefy boys in tight shorts, having an innocent sing along around the fire. I am fortunate to have grown up in Sydney, a city with some of the worlds most beautiful beaches,

Now that we have well and truly entered the age of the budget airline, international airports are popping up all over the place. For instance, why slink into the UK via the transit lounges of London when Birmingham could be your international destination of choice?

Forget the long queues at the capitol airport’s immigration desk, things are a little more manageable in Birmingham.