Postcard from Bishkek

Today marks the anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake: a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck 70km east off the coast of the Tohoku region in northeast Honshu, Japan’s largest island, followed by tsunami waves up to 40m high. Soon after, explosions and radioactive leaks rocked the nearby Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini nuclear power plants, […]

A short while ago, having seen a couple of news items about how many British tourists travel without taking out insurance cover, I wrote a couple of postcards about what happens when something goes wrong.  One concentrated on the need for travel insurance and the other looked at the sort of things than can happen […]

 Some time ago, I wrote a postcard about “What happens if something goes wrong”  and the need for travel insurance.  It was not the first time I have written a postcard about the need for travel insurance and I have written others which have included examples where people have encountered problems, for example, when they lose […]

Last week I cam across a worrying news item: according to the results of a survey conducted by the Association of British Travel Agents, as many as 20% of Brits travel without insurance.  Now, although I am often suspicious about surveys, this report set my alarm bells ringing. A similar survey earlier in the year came to […]

A new report landed on my desk at the end of last week: The World Risk Report 2011, by a team of researchers from the United Nations University. It came to my attention in a newsletter that I receive several times a week which carried the headline: Malta – the safest place on Earth?  Now, […]

The working day in the office, technically, runs from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., but it rarely works out like that.  In fact, my working day usually starts at six a.m. when I come downstairs to the office from my apartment which is literally “just over the office”.  I rarely finish work early, however, and […]

I wrote last week that we had received a new strategy for the development of tourism in the Kyrgyz Republic until 2015. I know that it is important to plan ahead and it is refreshing to see people thinking on a scale greater than “today … and perhaps tomorrow” and there seems to be something about […]

It might seem surprising, but despite the events in Kyrgyzstan since April, there are still tourists visiting the country … not many, but the season is not “as dead as a doornail”.   Not yet, at least.

One of the most important aspects of our job as a tour operator is to think ahead and try to foresee what could possibly go wrong, and then to plan to avoid that situation or, at least, to plan a course of action to minimize the problems that are caused as a result.

I have some “house guests” at the moment … four of the baseball kids are staying with me … they called me late in the evening on Monday night a few weeks ago to tell me that the roof on their house had “fallen in” and landed on two of the girls.   They were obviously […]