Archive for January 2012
Starting A Cruise Travel Agency
For people who love to travel, starting a travel agency specializing in cruises can be very exciting. Earning a living by talking about your cruise experiences and helping direct less experienced cruisers to the right vacation can be very rewarding. Many people are also attracted to the travel discounts you can receive by becoming a member of the International Airline Travel Agency Network (IATAN). Membership is available after earning $5,000 in commissions during the previous 12 month period.
It takes a little while to build your business. Great customer service and knowledge of the business are key ingredients to a successful career. Cruise lines tend to specialize to certain types of people. Some appeal to older crowds, others have many activities for children, while look for more active cruisers by providing more daytime activities on the ship or nighttime entertainment choices. One of the best ways to gain a lot of customers quickly is to sell a group trip. Join local groups, religious organizations, college alumni programs, etc.
Cruise lines typically pay commissions of 12% – 15% of the base fare. This excludes charges for port taxes and government fees. Additional money can be made by selling travel insurances where commissions are much higher, selling tours while your clients are on land and booking airfare and transportation to the airport or port. If your clients take travel insurance, they will be covered in case of delays, lost luggage or sickness, which will reduce your chances of having an unhappy customer.
As with any upstart business, you need to control expenses. A cruise travel agency can be operated right out of your home with the majority of work done through the telephone or internet. Cruise tickets can be sent by messengers to your clients. One of your more important and higher expenses will be the Errors and Omission Insurance Policy. This will protect you from mistakes during the booking process or from errors in printed materials or advertising.
Tokyo Climate – City Highs and Lows – When is Best to Travel?
What’s The Tokyo Climate Like?
Well for starters the Tokyo climate is temperate in nature which means you do need to plan ahead a little if you have a weather preference. If you’re visiting Japan and intend on traveling a little further afield, then from top to bottom, the country may vary by up to 20 or more degrees. Okinawa in the south is tropical, while Hokkaido in the north has deep snow for around 3 months of the year. Tokyo city, being in the middle, has fewer extremes although the range of temperatures between summer and winter is still one to be reckoned with.
So what do you need to know about the Tokyo climate?
Winter is dry and cold Summer is hot and humid Rainy season is, well… rainy! Spring sees hanami season in full bloom Autumn is full of colorful leaves and clear views
Which Season Is Best To Visit Tokyo City?
This is a really difficult question to answer as it really is down to personal preference. You’re coming to Tokyo so you’re not expecting to sunbathe on the beach – at least I hope not or you’ve got the wrong end of the stick!
The best way I can respond is to share my feelings about the seasons and give a brief summary of the benefits of each. Yes, you see, that’s the problem, there are pluses to all the seasons. Ho hum, no-one said this would be an easy decision.
Tokyo Winter
The Tokyo climate in winter is a great time for catching some good views of the mountains that surround the city. Don’t forget that only an hour away on the shinkansen lies the ever beautiful Mount Fuji. When I catch site of her on a clear cold morning on my way to work I always feel I’ll have a better day.
Tokyo Spring
This is when the famous hanami season parties, or cherry blossom viewing parties, are the must go to event if you’re here. Timing for this one is a fine art as the season only lasts around 2 weeks at any given place in the country, starting in Okinawa and working up the country to Hokkaido in a gorgeous band of pink.
Tokyo Summer
Many people that I know say this is their least favorite time of year. Me, I’m the odd one out as I happen to like the heat that comes with summer. If you’re not a fan of humidity though, best to stay away as it can become very heavy, especially during August.
Tokyo Autumn
Finally, Autumn. If you love seeing the changing of the leaves then Tokyo and Japan will not disappoint. There are reds, golds, yellows, oranges, and browns from all corners of the color spectrum. Just an hour away from Tokyo you can be in the middle of the countryside at Mount Takao or Nikko and enjoy koyo (the color change) in all its glory.
Well, that’s only a brief look at the Tokyo climate but it gives you a start on what to expect. See below if you want to learn more…
Time Travel – Is It Possible? Part 2
I should point out that for purely practical reasons, space exploration by any kind of space vehicle from your planet will always be limited due to the time factors involved. You will never be able to travel to the past or future in a vehicle as in the “Back to the Future” movies, since the past or future do not exist in the physical universe. But the do exist.
Travel to the past, future and the furthest galaxy is possible through usage of built in characteristics that you, the human species already posses, and sometimes use unbeknownst to you. To some extent, these latent characteristics are not exclusive to the human species, and the animals and even trees view far greater expanses of the present than you do, since even the animals, flowers, trees and your cells posses a very generalized usage of telepathic communication and clairvoyance especially with the other cells, and include much more of reality in their present. Your present exists only for a moment before it becomes your past, but animals and plant life view of the present includes decades of your present time.
Most of these built in, latent abilities remain inaccessible to the conscious ego self (YOU) at this time, but you were not meant to remain ignorant of these abilities forever, and will rediscover and develop these senses that are yours by heritage, and that time in now. Animals, trees and flowers do not experience time as you do, so to them, the past, present and future exist in the now and their perception is not based on a series of moments or events as in your case.
Time travel is carried on quite regularly by you as you mentally communicate with past incarnated selves, with long dead relatives and sometimes even future selves in your dreams, but conscious recognition of these meetings is usually filtered out of the sanitized dream that is available to the awake ego self, making some dreams almost unintelligible or at best chaotic.
Of course, the methods of communication is somewhat different than you now use, depending on the immediacy of the personality you communicate with. Those who are by your standards, dead, quickly learn at first to communicate though the use of word oriented mental concepts. Later, through the use of concepts only without the support of accompanying words, dream symbolism that is meaningful to your sub-conscious, but not your ego self.
That is usually why you don’t remember details of your dreams, but your inner sub-conscious does remember and makes use of these messages and sends the appropriate ones to the proper areas of your sub-conscious where some of the most pertinent dream information is filtered up to the attention of the ego to be used in your daily life situations.
When you sleep at night you dream, but you also on occasion leave your dreams, your consciousness projecting from your dream utilizing your astral form and it is in those out-of-body projections where you are fundamentally free of the restraints of the ego and its dependence on time, while it is lulled into a resting state.
You are, depending on your abilities, able to visit locations that you are familiar with in daily life, sometimes in fact looking in on old friends unbeknownst to them since your body would not be materialized in physical matter and would be essentially invisible and transparent. There are occasions when your body could be perceived if the emotional connection with the visited party was strong enough. These projected forms are sometimes confused with ghosts and apparitions.
There is a great difference between dream locations and out-of-body body visited locations, and I want to make sure this is understood. In your dreams, you actually construct a particular location within the dream world or dream universe, and in your terms, this locations does not exist in the physical universe, but it does intrude into the physical world through your recognition of its reality. Distances experienced while traveling in dream reality do not exist in the physical world, but they are quite real and infinite in the dream universe.
When your dream ends, this dream location cannot be recalled or ended and it achieves independence and will continue to exist in the dream universe which also continues to exist even though you are no longer concerned with it when you are awake. You construct this dream location out of atoms, but atoms of a different nature, with definite form structure and duration, but without mass or bulk in much the same way that you construct the physical universe.
In an out-of-body projection, you are actually sending a certain portion of your consciousness out into the existing physical world to an actual location. These out-of-body projections can be achieved from the dream state, which is the easiest to attain, or the induced trance state, which usually requires more advanced skill and development.
Usually in these out-of-body projections, you are actually traveling in the physical world, the distances traveled, usually limited at first, can essentially expand to include travel to anywhere in the physical world, but not limited to it.
What I mean by that is, it is possible with practice to visit other realities within your own solar system in this out-of-body state, but the ability to visit other galaxies would be most difficult at this time until new abilities are formed.
Another consideration, usually when projecting in an out-of-body form, originating within the dreaming condition, you have very little control on where or what you will see, so there is usually some confusion or else no recognition at all that an actual projection really happened. You can influence these out-of-body travels by requesting a visit to someone close to you by ejecting your consciousness from the dream state.
Because of the chaotic nature of dreams, you would be hard pressed to differentiate between actually meeting a friend or an alien, a recently dead relative or visiting an alien planet or having a particularly lucid dream.
Now, some people have the natural ability to enter a trance state easily with definite purpose in mind. They can induce an out-of-body projection to a particular location and with prior agreement with another party, could in fact, meet at the desired location while both were still sound asleep at home in their beds. These out-of-body astral forms then temporarily vacate the physical body, taking their full consciousness along with them on their journeys and under favorable conditions can communicate with each other when they meet while in the out-of-body condition.
There are in fact, people that you know that you have never met physically, some from other realities that you have met in out-of-body of body situations. This projected form has some substance at times, through the use of a less than a less than complete materialization, but still, full conscious cognition is involved and full capacity to communicate through telepathy.
In other words, during this type of projection, the sleeping physical body is maintained by the “body consciousness” inherent in the cellular structure of the body itself, without the usual oversight and help of the organizing consciousness or true identity (You). These projections, purposely initiated, have sometimes been called “Remote Viewing” and was experimented with during the second world war by many governmental agencies by the United States, Soviet Union and other participants trying to ascertain conditions and information in other countries on the opposing side from afar.
This is the basis for future travel on your planet and beyond to distant galaxies. A future personality will be able to project his consciousness to a selected location or reality system. In order to be perceived by another being, a personality must materialize a physical body, no matter of what system you would be visiting. All physical reality systems here or alien, located on or near the outer fringes of the universe utilize atoms to construct their camouflage physical bodies and their camouflage environment even though they may not look like yours. You could simply visit an alien system with an out of body projection without materializing a body, but you would remain an observer, pretty much unable to interact since you would not be perceived and in order to be perceived and viable within that alien system, you would have to adapt your physical body structure to one corresponding to the prevailing rules of the reality you were visiting.
So, if you would want to utilize a physical body in the visited reality system, you would first have to project your consciousness to where you want to go, then, utilizing the atoms at hand there, build up a relevant physical body at the new location. A future person will be able to do this quite handily, and as I said, it is done even now to some extent from dream projections, without your conscious knowledge.
In reverie, if you think longingly of a favorite place at the beach on a misty morning, your actual consciousness could project to that location and if the emotional tie was strong enough, you might even smell the salty sea air. Under these kind of emotional connections, you may even be able to be seen by others in a transparent sort of way, as a wispy shadow in the mist.
What this would mean is that, your consciousness was actually there, not just a dreaming body, but to some extent a fully cognoscente conscious You, and you would have left your sleeping body home alone. As long as a materialized body is not a priority, and simple exploration of other realities is the primary goal, this all become much easier and in fact, is done quite often through spontaneous projections from your dreams.
Remember, in a dream, you create the people, objects and images, in projections, the people, objects and images are real, and the people you visit may remember the occasion.
A whole book could be written on this subject, and I fear I may have left you more confused than before we began the article, but I will elaborate as we go along.