news about cheap fares and airlines from travel search engine Trabber

The first flights of the new airlines that will take tourists past the threshold of space are poised to take off in 2012, and getting a seat on one is not all that different from booking a trip someplace on Earth. You can sign up on the Web site of, say, Virgin Galactic, the most prominent of the new space tourism companies, or go to a travel agent and put down a hefty deposit. Soon you will be able to buy travel insurance, just as you can for any other vacation.

Virgin Galactic intends to start offering flights just beyond the space barrier on a rocket ship it has built, featuring five minutes of weightlessness during a two-and-a-half hour jaunt. At $200,000 a seat.

When the question of whether to offer space travel insurance first came up three or four years ago, “‘we said it was a joke at that time,”‘ recalled Erick Morazin, global accounts director at Allianz Global Assistance.

Currently, Virgin Galactic, XCOR and Space Adventures refund almost all of the deposit if someone wants to cancel, but Mr. Morazin said he expected their policies to become less forgiving in the future. “‘We will be prepared for this milestone,'” he said.

source: nytimes.com

Virgin Atlantic has been honoured with the ‘Best International Airline award’ in the ninth annual Readers’ Choice Awards.

Organised by leading industry publication Travel Weekly, the awards identify the best service across a number of categories.

Delta Airlines came top in the American carrier category, while Singapore Airlines was hailed the best for providing business and first class services.

source: travel.aol.co.uk

Dnata, the holidays and baggage handling arm of Emirates Airline, has bought control of one of the biggest online travel agents in Britain.

The deal struck at the end of last month for an undisclosed sum is the latest in a buying spree of travel firms by Dnata asit seeks to strengthen its position in the lucrative online travel market.

The acquisition of Travel Republic also has the potential to channel more UK traffic through the Dubai company.

source: thenational.ae

Swiss International Air Lines has carried a record number of passengers this year, surpassing the 15-million mark.

Swiss was created after the collapse of the national carrier Swissair ten years ago under a mountain of debts. After getting off to a rocky start, the fledgling airline was bought out by the Lufthansa group in 2005.

Under the wing of Lufthansa, Swiss has not only survived the financial crisis and boom in oil prices but has become one of the most commercially successful airlines.

source: swissinfo.ch

Boarding an airplane has never been safer.

The past decade has been the best in the country’s aviation history with 153 fatalities. That’s two deaths for every 100 million passengers on commercial flights, according to an Associated Press analysis of government accident data.

The improvement is remarkable. Just a decade earlier, at the time the safest, passengers were 10 times as likely to die when flying on a U.S. plane. The risk of death was even greater during the start of the jet age, with 1,696 people dying – 133 out of every 100 million passengers – from 1962 to 1971. The figures exclude acts of terrorism.

source: sfgate.com

Argentine authorities are tracing a suspected major animal trafficking ring after a Czech man was caught trying to smuggle hundreds of snakes and other exotic animals out of the country.

Karel Abelovsky was arrested in early December as he tried to board a flight to Spain from Buenos Aires.

Suspicions were raised when staff manning the airport X-ray machine at Ezeiza airport saw his suitcase moving.

It was found to contain some 250 animals, including 10 boa constrictors.

source: BBC.co.uk

A hotel is celebrating after selling the most expensive dessert in the world.

Lindeth Howe Country House Hotel in Windermere, Cumbria, could only be crowned the title-holder if a customer was to dig deep and buy the £22,000 pudding it was offering.

Carl Weininger from Rugby, Warwickshire, splashed out on the wildly extravagant chocolate pudding as a treat for his 60th birthday on December 5 and the hotel’s culinary team is now waiting for confirmation that the dessert will take its place in the ‘Guinness Book of World Records’.

Styled like a Faberge Easter egg, the chocolate pudding is believed to have broken all previous records thanks to its pricey list of ingredients which includes gold, champagne caviar and a two-carat diamond.

source: Press Association

Emirates, one of the world’s fastest-growing international airlines, is celebrating the New Year by offering exceptional discounts on airfares to more than 100 cities, when booking from now until January 9, 2012.

Customers can save up to 25 per cent off all published First Class, Business Class and Economy Class fares departing between 22 January and 30 June 2012, when travelling round-trip to any destination on Emirates’ extensive global network.

Renowned for its excellence in service and innovation, both on board and on the ground, Emirates holds an array of prestigious awards, including Air Transport World’s 2011 “‘Airline of the Year'” award and the Skytrax World Airline Award for “‘World’s Best Airline Inflight Entertainment,'” for the seventh year in a row.

Wi-Fi on long flights seems like a no-brainer, but travelers are apparently sticking to other tried-and-true boredom killers in the air ” like celebrity magazines and booze. According to SplatF, of the 355 million people who have flown on planes equipped with Gogo’s inflight Wi-Fi since 2008, only 15 million sessions have been logged, which means that only 4% of people are going online.

Gogo, which just filed to go public, makes up 85% of the inflight Wi-Fi business, providing 1,323 planes with service. While only a small percentage of airline passengers sign on to Gogo’s Wi-Fi, there’s good news ” 84% of commercial planes in North America are still without Internet service, meaning there’s a huge untapped market out there just waiting to get wired.

Source: Time

A class-action lawsuit filed earlier this month in the US District Court in Miami by California consumer attorney John Mattes, Florida attorney David Tucker, and two other law firms, claims that Delta is only reimbursing passengers for a fraction of what they’re entitled to by law.

Passengers are allowed to claim up to $3,300 in reasonable expenses for their lost or delayed bags, according to federal regulations. Delta airlines, however, told passengers last year that they were only responsible to repay customers $25 a day for lost or delayed baggage, and up to $125 total. The airline was fined $100,000 by the US Department of Transportation for those claims.

About 130,000 bags were “‘mishandled'” by domestic airlines in October alone, according to the most recent DOT data. Delta reported mishandling about 16,000 bags that month and a total of about 328,000 for all of 2010. Over 2 million claims of mishandled bags were filed by passengers in 2010.