Just America Blog

A brief visit to New York last week made me appreciate just what a great short break destination this wonderful city is. It is amazing just how much you can do in four days.
Travelling with my 19 year old shopaholic son (Alex) who had been saving for months, was interesting and hitting the outlet mall and designer shops of Manhattan was his main focus. Having been to New York before this teen shopper was slightly less interested in the major sites and definitely not keen to visit any museums and galleries.
My main purpose was to visit some of the hotels we feature, do a little shopping and take in some of the lesser known attractions. I have been to New York many times over the last 30 plus years and done most of the major sites, so the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln Center and the major museums did not feature on this itinerary. Shopping is always good value in the US and a trip to the Woodbury Common outlet shops on day two reinforced this. At Bass shoes I managed to get three pairs of shoes for the price of one pair – £84.00 for three great pairs of shoes! The rate of exchange was a very reasonable $1.61 to the Pound on my credit card. Alex struggled back onto the bus to Manhattan clutching several bags containing an assortment of designer shirts, jeans etc from the likes of Ralph Lauren, Armani and Lacoste – unbelievable bargains.
We parted company on day 3 as Alex started his assault on the Manhattan shops and I took off for Greenwich Village. I had heard of a wonderful walking tour of Greenwich – a food tour – escorted by a local expert. I met my fellow foodies at Murray’s Cheese Shop on Bleecker Street and for the next three hours we ambled through this fascinating neighbourhood visiting some ten restaurants and delis, sampling everything from olive oil to pizza, cheese to ravioli. The samples were substantial and provided us with a hefty mobile lunch and well as informing us about the manufacture of the food. New Yorkers are passionate about their food and those visitors to the city who complain that you can’t get a healthy meal in New York really haven’t done their homework. Local New Yorkers shop differently to us. Instead of doing their weekly shop in a major supermarket, driving in and loading up the car with groceries, the residents of New York shop on a daily basis and eat out a lot more. It is a bit like food shopping was in the UK before the advent of mega supermarkets. So there are small specialist shops – such as Amy’s Bread, Murray’s Cheese, Mediterranean Food Merchants etc. on every street, all experts in their chosen speciality and keen to stress the quality of their food and its ingredients. We learnt a lot about olive oil, we met Joe – founder of Joe’s Pizza – one of the most famous pizzerias in New York (his shop has featured in several movies), we met Lydia ‘the Cuban Grandma you never had’ at her wonderful, but tiny, Cuban restaurant – “Little Havana”. Interspersed with this culinary grazing we learnt a lot about the architecture and history of Greenwich Village and came away pleasantly educated and well fed. This is a tour I would heartily recommend to anyone visiting New York, a real eye-opener and tummy filler! Contact Just America for details.
My next stop was the Tenement Museum. Having recently watch Dan Snow’s excellent TV series ‘Filthy Cities’ I was interested to see the programme on New York prior to my visit. In it, Dan visited the Tenement Museum and I decided it was somewhere I just had to check out. The museum is housed in one of the old tenements at 97 Orchard Street in the lower east side of Manhattan. The building had been boarded up and abandoned for over 50 years before the museum’s founders Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson discovered this ‘time capsule’. They set about telling the stories of the building’s occupants who lived here between the 1860’s and the 1930’s, extremely poor immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe who endured the most incredible poverty and appalling living conditions. There are several escorted tours, each telling the story of a different family. My tour – the Moore’s Tour – told the story of the Moore family who escaped the Irish potato famine of the mid-1800s and who immigrated to New York and lived at 97 Orchard Street for a year. We walked through the tiny yard where four wooden privies were shared by the occupants of the eight over crowded apartments and the staff and customers of the tavern on the ground floor. Outbreaks of various diseases, malnutrition and hard labour contributed to the low life expectancy and the Moores suffered along with their neighbours. During their short stay at 97 Orchard Street the Moores lost their youngest child and the parlour of their former home is set out as it would have been on the day of the young girl’s funeral. The Tenement Museum’s building has been left in its dilapidated state except for essential maintenance and safety concerns. How anyone survived the squalor and malnutrition of these hard times is difficult to understand, but the museum is a ‘must do’ on anyone’s itinerary and it provides a fascinating glimpse into New York’s history. Contact Just America for details.
The GrayLine of New York double-decker sightseeing tour was again very useful. This hop- on/hop-off service operates several loops and we used the lower Manhattan loop several times during our stay. Boarding from our hotel in Times Square we headed south to Greenwich Village, hopped off for breakfast at a great diner, reboarded the bus, enjoyed the commentary by the tour director, hopped off again at Battery Park, took the Staten Island Ferry (free) for the 50 minute return cruise across New York harbour, jumped on the bus again – but couldn’t understand the heavy accent of the tour director, so got off at the next shop (South Street Seaport) had lunch and boarded another bus – this time with a very knowledgeable and funny tour director – and rode the bus past the UN Building to Central Park enjoying the sunny weather on the open top deck all the way.
A quick visit to the Empire State Building on our final morning when the skies had cleared and visibility was over 50 miles provided the perfect finale to our break. All that was left to do was a leisurely picnic in Bryant Park with food supplies from a local deli – New York’s best bargain – and then the shuttle to the airport. After four full days of shopping, sightseeing and hotel inspections we boarded the BA flight back to Heathrow, tired, blistered and broke, but with more happy memories of a wonderful city.
Call us at Just America and let us design a short break to New York for you and your friends or family.
Mike

Wow, the new year has got off to a fantasic start!   It is odd that the whole world seems to suddenly think ‘holidays’ as soon as January arrives and there is a sudden scramble to book that all important summer holiday.   California tops the destination charts at the moment – well it does have everything – with the American Rockies (Colorado/Wyoming/South Dakota/Montana) coming a close second with our new Extended Trails West self-drive tour proving very popular.

It is also interesting (and very frustrating) how some people approach booking there holiday.  We often get the briefest of emails – ten words or less – asking us to produce a honeymoon itinerary with five destinations; a multi centre holiday with 15 hotels or more – yet no mention of how many people are travelling, what standard of hotels, departure airport etc.  Do people serious expect us to provide ‘the holiday of a lifetime’ from a two line email!!   When we seek more information we often get the response – ‘well you’re the experts, you tell us’.   We might be the experts, but we are not psychic!    Please, if you want us to provide you with a price quotation , or itinerary suggestion, then let us know what you want, or better still call us and have chat.  A five minute phone call can make all the difference and allows us to more accurately assess what you want and thus helps us get the itinerary and costing correct.    We are fully prepared to spend hours providing various permutations, itineraries etc, but we need our enthusiasm to be at least matched by the customer.    Okay, rant over…

The airline seat sales are just about over – for now.  We have no idea if the special offer fares with the major airlines will be extended past the current 25th Jan deadline – so if you have had a price from us in the last few days it might be worth getting the flights booked before next Tuesday.  Flight availability for those key peak season dates, particularly end of July and throughout August, is very limited and will not get better, so if you don’t want to lose out and have to pay more, then get booking now.

As we near the end of our 20^th year it is difficult to resist the temptation to look back at the last 20 years and the massive changes that have taken place and which have shaped the world of travel today.

In those early days in late 1990 Britain was in a recession, the first Gulf War was under way and a feeling of doom and gloom prevailed. Sounds familiar.   I remember worrying that no one could afford to travel, even at an exchange rate of nearly $2 to the Pound.  As we worked hard on our little Amstrad word processor to produce the first Just America brochure, we wondered what we had let ourselves in for.  At that time our ABTA membership had not been approved.  We were caught by the crazy rule of ‘you can’t be a member until you’ve been trading, and you can’t trade until you’re a member’.  No one in their right mind would book with a tour operator who was not an ABTA member.  None of the major newspapers would carry an ad without an ABTA membership number, so it was neigh on impossible to advertise.  However we finally received our ABTA approval at the same time as the Gulf War ended so we were able to place ads and the bookings rolled in – we made a profit in the first year! 

The old Amstrad was replaced, we moved into bigger offices, employed more staff and endured the countless changes to consumer protection – most of it totally useless, saw airlines come and go and learnt how to use email, websites and – now blogs! 

In those early days, in fact for the first ten years, we spent a fortune on newspaper advertising and brochure production.  The advent of the broadband age however meant that we could stop filling landfill sites with paper brochures and invest instead in a more environmentally friendly e-brochure – our website.  In June 2000 we stopped all major newspaper advertising and in December of that year we launched our website.  With fingers crossed we hoped and prayed that this bold move would pay off.  The result was a slight decline in passengers in 2001, but a huge saving in advertising and brochure costs.  Instead of producing thousands of paper brochures each year at a cost of about £25k per year, plus another £6k in postage and stationery, we were able to get our product direct to our target market instantly at a fraction of the cost.   We don’t claim to be the greenest company in the world, but we are doing our best to reduce the amount of paper we waste – most of our waste paper is shredded and converted into paper briquettes to use on our stoves!  Less paper brochures also means less delivery petrol miles and less pollutants – all those glossy pages were not very ‘green’.

The e-brochure has enabled us to grow the business yet keep our overheads low.  This not only means we are more profitable, but we can keep the cost of holidays down, have a much wider range of products in our portfolio, keep our information and tours up-to-date in this fast changing and dynamic environment.

9/11, ash clouds, strikes, airline failures, wars, economic recessions, wild currency fluctuations and changing holiday habits have all presented challenges and just when we think we’ve seen it all,  new challenges present themselves – never a dull moment.

As we enter our 21^st year, I think we can look back with a certain amount of pride that we have not only survived these tumultuous times, but in fact we have thrived, grown as a company and emerged profitable and healthier when many others have not.

I guess the true barometer of our success is in the high level of repeat business we enjoy.  A large number of our clients have enjoyed many holidays with us in the last 20 years which is wonderful and testament that we must be doing something right.  We don’t seek out the glitzy industry awards, the black-tie ceremonies and the media froth, instead the wonderful letters, emails and postcards we receive each year are our awards and motivation to keep improving. 

 I think Mark Twain summed it up rather well when he said “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore. Dream. Discover”

Let Just America help you explore, dream and discover.

 Mike Easton