EasyGroup, the holding company of serial entrepreneur, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, reports that its newest tourism brands, EasyCruise and EasyHotel are off to a very successful start, with near-full occupancy through November 2005. Travelers must book now at www.easyCruise.com or www.easyHotel.com to take advantage of the lowest prices for the December and New Year´s holidays. Both EasyCruise and EasyHotel extend EasyGroup´s core brand strategy of providing consumers with value through relentless innovation applied to vacation experiences.

In its endeavor to offer personal touch to its customers, online travel retailer ThomasCook.com has deployed RightNow´s on demand CRM suite to provide a centralized, 360-degree customer view. The company is using RightNow´s on-demand CRM to manage service interactions across phone, email and web channels. Thomascook.com says it has been able to improve the quality of customer calls received by service agents.

Consumer prices in Jamaica jumped 2.6 percent in September, pushing inflation for the first half of the fiscal year to 10.2 percent, and a 12 month total of 19 percent, according to the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN). Price increases in September were recorded in all groups measured index in the basket of goods used by STATION. But the largest growth was in transportation, driven by higher prices for petroleum products and the increase in bus fares, which moved in August from $30 one stage and $40 two stage to a flat $50 in August.

Troubled airline carrier Air Jamaica is to broach ´the beginning of a new chapter´ with the appointment of Michael Conway as the company´s CEO. Jamaica´s finance minister Omar Davies introduced a new 12-member board for the national airline, even though the board is mainly made up of previous members.

Thomas Cook has chosen Group 1 Software´s DOC1 Series 5 in a bid to further develop its customer communications strategy. The company was seeking a solution that could offer coordinated Customer Communications Management (CCM) with four objectives: taking in customer data from many sources, making it available through different systems, creating and standardizing documentation for more efficient and effective production and distribution, and finally storing an archive of customer communications that can be automatically updated and retrieved to help answer customer service queries.

The Netherlands welcomed 16 percent more North American visitors in the first half of 2005, compared to the year before, according to Dutch tourism officials. It´s the second year the tiny northwestern European destination is seeing double-digit growth out of the U.S. and Canada. Conrad van Tiggelen, director North America for the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions (NBTC) in New York, said he hopes to sustain the growth trend, despite a steadily weak U.S. dollar.