That vacation you’re not thinking about has just gotten less expensive. And it doesn’t have anything to do with declining prices because of the Wall Street mess either.

What has happened is that the dollar has been slowly and quietly been gaining strength against some other currencies during the past few months. That gives you a lot more buying power in some overseas vacation spots.

For example, look at the approximate increase in value of the dollar versus some other currencies since June 1. The dollar now buys you 23.4% more Euros, almost 35% more British Pounds, 47% more Aussie dollars, and 33% more South African Rands, It goes 36% further in Norway, about 15% In Switzerland and a whopping 89% in Iceland.

Not all destinations are offering fire-sale prices on their exchange rate, however. Argentina’s peso has only changed about 7% in our favor and China has become more expensive, for example.

The dollar hasn’t returned to its glory days, of course, but there’s more to the picture. Despite air fares staying relatively high — although you can snag a few good bargains if you look around — hotel prices are edging downward due to that better exchange rate. Remember that great exchange rate in Iceland? According to Forbes, you can now stay in a four-star hotel in Iceland for $70.00 per night. Basically, the entire country is on sale.

But the really good news is that you can now find hotels that are waving about some good deals to lure you in.  Just log onto places such as TravelZoo, Shermans, Orbitz, etc. or Google some of the better-know chains and see what deals you can unearth. You may be surprised.

Jim Ferri

The first thing that you notice flying into Beijing (which, by the way, on all airlines tickets still has the old PEK designation for Peking) is the incredible amount of air pollution. This changed two days after our arrival as a brief rain and windy morning cleansed the city, but still, after traveling the world for nearly 40 years I have never seen such pollution. Years back some said it was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Today bring a chain saw.

The people, for the most part, are fascinating and gentle. On the other hand, as a traveler you still feel the heavy hand of the state despite all the hoopla surrounding the Olympics…the bureaucracy at the airport, the huge police presence in Tiananmen Square, the censorship of the Internet.

For a while the Internet and my laptop drove me crazy The entire time I was there I couldn’t post any blogs despite trying numerous times. Nothing would work. Everything on-screen looked the same and seemed to work the same, but in the end China’s internet would never allow you to upload any materials or photos and video.

The second thing that struck me, in addition to being warned three times a day that everything is counterfeit, is that every time you want to buy anything you have to go through the hassle of haggling. Guys hate having to bargain — just give me a fair price and we’ll do business. But here everything is negotiated, with you finally paying about 20-25% of the asking price. Stop in any market and you must run a gauntlet of half the population of Beijing, which in itself is a sideshow. Shop for an hour and you need three to recuperate.

But the real sideshow for me took place whenever I changed money at our hotel, the Regent Beijing. Four times I handed over dollars to the desk clerk and then stood back and watched the show unfold. First, of course, would come the request for my passport. Step two, my money would be very carefully counted twice, even if it’s only five 20-dollar bills. Then I would watch as it is put through a machine — not once, but twice, which seems to be the magic number here — that quickly flipped it through, counting it, scanning it or doing God-only-knows what to it.

Now the desk clerk would count it still again, probably just to ensure the machine wasn’t skimming anything, and would then type the serial number of each bill into a computer. FINALLY, she would hand me a receipt to sign before starting the process of counting out the Chinese Yuan.

Once I made the half-day trip out to and back from the Great Wall in less time than it took to change a couple of bucks for taxi fare.

Jim Ferri

Numerous companies throughout the sector — hotels, airlines, theme parks, cruise lines, casinos, you name it — have warned that bad times are to come in the year ahead.

Hotels will certainly take a big hit and the pain is already being felt. Since March, Starwood’s stock has fallen 68.5%, Marriott’s by 53%. If you think those declines are bad, the situation at the Las Vegas Sands is nothing short of horrific — it’s stock has plummeted more than 94 percent since last December, the latest hit coming last week following an auditor’s report concerning doubts about Sands’ ability to stay in business.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is forecasting that demand for hotels will fall by 2 percent, which on the surface may not appear to be significant. But when you factor in the increase in supply in hotel rooms, real occupancy levels will fall to nearly 58%.

“This is an unprecedented period of decline in recent history,” Reuters recently quoted hotel industry veteran Bjorn Hanson of New York University as saying. “This just is unlike any period we have to compare.”

Things aren’t much better in the cruise industry where Carnival’s bookings for 2009 lag bookings for the same time in 2008. Along with Carnival, Royal Caribbean has also warned about a slowdown.

Even at Disney, which had been weathering the early days of the recession fairly well since it had begun repositioning itself as a value-oriented, family-vacation experience, things are taking a turn for the worse. The company has just reported a sharp downturn in hotel bookings, and said that attendance at its US parks was down about 1 percent this quarter. Worse, however, is the fact that bookings for the first two quarters of fiscal 2009 are currently off about 10 percent. That’s a number that could grow depending on which way the economic winds blow with a new administration arriving in Washington.

And that’s exactly where all of this is going to land: in Washington. Needless to say, as the economy continues to disintegrate around us there are very few people, John McCain and a few others notwithstanding, who’d want to be in Obama’s shoes.

Many American industries need help at the moment. Although it’s the financial and auto industries that are getting the most play in the media at the moment, let’s hope that the new administration doesn’t close its eyes to the plight of the travel industry — and more importantly, wakes up to how this industry can help in some small way to turn around the economy.

Following Obama’s historic victory, Roger Dow, president and CEO of the Travel Industry Association (TIA), pledged that the industry would support the anew administration in improving the economy and bolstering America’s international image.

Since the industry is a major economic force in every state, and not only accounts for more than $700 billion in spending but also for employing one out of every eight US workers in one capacity or another, it is quite an economic force.

The US travel industry may not be the engine that will turn the economy around, but it certainly can be one of the locomotives that can help jumpstart it. Let’s just hope all those folks in Washington stop arguing partisan politics and get this train moving down the right track.

Jim Ferri

In Tokyo, recently, a bald, naked man who said he was a British tourist went swimming in the moat of Japan’s Imperial Palace, climbed the palace wall, and threw rocks and splashed water at police before being taken into custody. He also got out of the water at one point, and chased police with a rock and a plastic construction site pole.

He then went back to the murky water and swam across to the other side of the moat, where he climbed up the 8-meter (9-yard) stone wall of the palace. Television showed passers-by gathering around the moat and watching the chase, giggling and taking photos on mobile phones.

“We are checking on his mental condition now,” a police spokesman said.

In Atlanta they’re checking a baggage handler for cardiac arrest. After opening the cargo hold of a Boeing 757 she found a cheetah running loose amid the luggage.

According to a Delta spokeswoman, one of two cheetahs being flown from Portland, Ore., to Atlanta escaped from its cage. The airline summoned help from Zoo Atlanta, and experts rushed to a closed airport hangar, tranquilized the escaped animal before transporting it to the zoo.

There’s nothing worse than an unexciting job, which is why at first we thought this was all part of an effort by Delta’s Human Resources Department to make airport jobs more exciting.

On the other side of the world, a bit of excitement is being generated in Munich by a new museum which is housed in an old public toilet.

Originally built in 1894, to serve nearby households which lacked facilities, the toilets were locked up in 1992 because of lack of use.

“On the night we opened, around 800 people came to see our work,” initiator of the museum project, Mathias Koehler told Reuters. He said that a toilet was a great place for artistic expression because art is a form of relief in the same way that going to the toilet is.

Herr Koehler has since been nominated for the “Eloquent Spokesperson of the Year” award.

Jim Ferri

Take my visit to London’s Heathrow airport a few days ago, to the much ballyhooed Terminal 5. The design of the new terminal is fantastic — broad spaces, good and rapid access to far-flung gates via train and escalators, comfortable seating areas around the gates (although they could have thrown in a few more outlets to recharge laptops and cell phones).

They’ve got some good restaurants such as the Giraffe — a great place to grab an American-style breakfast after arrival — but some of the new restaurants, such as Gordon Ramseys “Plane Food”, have prices at the same altitude as the 747s flying in here.

That’s one of the problems with Heathrow — everything is so expensive. Want a glass of OJ at Ramsey’s after your early morning arrival? It will set you back about $5. If that’s enough to send you to something a bit harder, go for the $15 Bloody Mary. I mean, come on, that’s $3 more than the Eggs Benedict.

The problem with Heathrow is that it wasn’t designed to be an airport. It was designed to be a shopping mall at which planes land and travelers are trapped.

Worse yet, many of the sales people seem to have been trained to extract every dollar and Euro from your wallet. The folks who ran the Spanish Inquisition could learn a few tricks from retailers here.

Although I wasn’t buying anything last Saturday, I walked into various shops to get a sense of the cost of things. When I entered the Duty Free liquor area I asked a clerk (who immediately latched on to me as they had in other shops) if they had Johnny Walker Red. His immediate reply was “Wouldn’t you much rather have Johnny Walker Black or Blue?” I felt like making him black and blue.

When I was back out on the concourse I stopped to take a photo of the shop and the surrounding area. Within seconds a sales clerk yelled over to me that I was not allowed to take photos of the Duty Free shop.

My mouth dropped when I said “What?”  “No,” she said coming over, “it’s not allowed and they confiscate the cameras of people who take photos.”

“Is that the law?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied.

“That’s incredible,” I said, “I’d like you to call a policeman so we can ask him about this.”

“I’m just doing my job,” she said, as she quickly walked away. I went to talk with her again a few minutes later but when she saw me coming she quickly moved away.

Jim Ferri

Just about everyone who knows me will tell you I’m not a fan of exotic foods either. Meat and potatoes are my staples. About as exotic as I get is anything eaten with chopsticks, and I can’t even master them. Put a set in my hands and food becomes airborne. And there’s nothing like shrimp flying like shrapnel across some fancy restaurant to enhance everyone’s dining experience.

But when the guide on a tour bus in Beijing the other day pointed to a long line of empty food stalls right beyond Cartier, Gucci and Sony, and told us that was the spot for the nightly food market, I just knew I had to see it for myself.

Open from around 6:00pm every night, I quickly discovered this is a place where they really push the food envelop. It’s not at all like shopping at your local supermarket or sitting down at a restaurant. In fact, there are no seats at all — it’s all stands, with food being grilled or deep fried for those who like to walk and munch.

It is raucous, with lights and music blaring, vendors yelling, crowds jostling to get to their favorite pièce de résistance. In this carnival-like atmosphere, everything is served on bamboo skewers, with so many flailing about that you risk being impaled.

There are plenty of tame eats, of course — corn and fruits stacked on skewers, vegetables, grilled giant prawns, squid, mug-bean cake, chicken and pork and a hundred other things.

If the video does not play, click here.

But there are also, I found out, those more exotic menu choices:  star fish (15Y or about $2.50), fired silk worms (5Y for about a half-dozen jammed on a skewer), sea snake, grilled sheep penis (50Y) and fried scorpions, ranging from 15Y for the smallest to 50Y for the giant six-inch ones, among other things.

I can’t remember if it was that sheep appendage or the monster scorpions that finally pushed me over the edge and annihilated my appetite, but I quit the crowd and headed around the corner for something Beijingers consider exotic. A Big Mac (22.50Y).

Jim Ferri

The “guy” is designer Pierangelo Masciadri. You probably don’t know of him, but you know of his customers — Bill Clinton, George Bush, HRH Prince Albert of Monaco, Bill Gates. The list goes on.

Pierangelo formerly worked for a lot of the big names in fashion including Pierre Cardin, Girogio Armani and others, before deciding to strike out on his own to design the ties and scarves and other things for which he has become well known.

His shop is in Bellagio, Italy on Lake Como, about an hour down the lake from well-known Como, the silk capital of Europe.

My wife Marjorie and I met Masciadri this past Sunday as we were wandering the steep storybook streets of Bellagio. He is an animated and affable guy (well, hello, this is Italy after all) and he shared his persception of his craft with us, looking at his little silk masterpieces as works of art.

“To design a tie is like creating a great painting,” he told us. “It uses the same philosophy.” He often frequents museums to study the works of some of the great masters for inspiration.

But what is all this about Clinton and Bush and the others?

It seems that Clinton wore a tie created by Pierangelo the day before he was elected president in 1992. Years later, before the Bush-Kerry presidential debates, one of Bush’s personal shoppers came by and told him that they knew Clinton had worn one of his ties, and they’d like Bush to have one, as well. Might there be a bit superstitious in Washington?

And how about the present presidential campaign? One of the present candidates had ordered a tie, he said, but refused to disclose whether it was Obama or McCain.

I, however, bought two — which will give me quite an edge if I decide to run for office.

Jim Ferri

This time it was on a train in Italy. Marjorie and I each had two bags, one a carry-on, the other each a monster that I’m certain some thought contained several small children. Ever since the genius who invented wheels on luggage had his/her “a-ha!” moment, taking half of one’s worldly possessions with you when you travel is no longer supposed to be a problem.

We had planned to leave Como about 8:00am and take the train to Milan’s airport. It’s easy enough to do — you only need to change trains once — and we had done it in reverse just a few days earlier. Our only problem — or should I say my problem since I had planned everything — was that this was rush hour.

Getting on in Como was a breeze since there were few people on the train. It wasn’t until we were a few stations down the track — with increasing numbers of people boarding at each stop — did we realize just how many people commute into Milan from out here everyday. It is not an insignificant number.

Although it seemed to be a good idea at the onset, I had caused a near-international incident by stacking our luggage on the two seats next to us. Even though it was getting progressively more crowded, it wasn’t until the tsunami hit us at the station before our change that I realized why the grumpy-looking women had given me such a disapproving look when we boarded. And I had thought it was because I didn’t have Louis Vuitton.

And soon there I sat. Cringing every time the door opened and people flooded in. By this time I had it all down pat - first they looked at the bags, then at me, back to the bags and then again at me. Hey, give me a break — I was just trying to be helpful so they wouldn’t block the aisle.

Anyway, we did manage to get out at the right station — these trains are good with both Italian and English announcements — dragging our behemoths out the door and away from the herd now lunging for our seats, only to realize we had to make the dash from Track 1, down the stairs, across the passageway, and up the stairs to Track 6.

We got there just in time. Just in time to watch the train pull out…