This is an UPDATED version of the AP article we posted yesterday:

Hotel chains (and lots of independent lodgings as well) are working to attract meetings, conferences and other group events with a variety of special packages and rates. Please, please, book your event here, and you willl be amazed what we can do for you on the overall cost, the hotels are saying. The AP has a good roundup on what the hoteliers are doing to battle the downturn in business.

UPDATE: The trade magazine Travel Weekly published a report today on how much hotel occupancy and room rates worldwide fell in February compared with a year ago. To help with the industry jargon in the article, ADR is average daily room rate, and RevPAR is revenue per available room, which is calculated by multiplying occupancy, or percentage of rooms occpied by paying customers, by the average daily rate. RevPAR is the basic measure of financial health in the lodging business. 

One of better roundups I've read in a long time on how business travelers use high-speed trains in Europe can be found on The Times of London's TimesOnline Web site. Anyone who travels for business or leisure within Europe should find the article helpful in knowing the cities that are now connected, downtown-to-downtown, in less than three or four hours by rail. Just as Amtrak's fairly high-speed trains from Boston to Washington through Philadelphia are competitive with airlines, Europe's system draws travelers away from the skies. And that's despite a plethora of discount airlines and often higher fares on many European rail routes.  

As you may know from visting here before, a new administration in Washington has given a boost in its economic stimulus program to development of more high-speed rail lines in this country, as I pointed out in my Feb. 23 Winging It column. Years, probably decades, will pass before we could have a rail network like the one described in the TimesOnline report. We have a tremendous amount of catching up to do, but we can hope, can't we?

Limited time and resources prevented anyone from The Inquirer attending US Airways annual media day, held yesterday at its Tempe, Ariz., headquarters. I was able to attend the event the last three years, and found it helpful for meeting airline officials and getting detail on some of their plans. But no big breaking news came out of the events in the past, and that seems to be the same this year. The only news story spotted this morning from the day is a short one in the trade paper Air Transport World. The article  notes that airline execs repeated their forecast for $400-$500 million in ancillary revenue this year from "a la carte" pricing of services such as checked bags. 

Related to all airlines' enthusiasm for finding sources of ancillary revenue, I found a good entry on a Web site of the International Association of Airline Passengers asking whether travelers should be expecting better baggage service if they're now paying extra for it.