We thought the Christmas season was the peak for threats of strikes by workers in the travel industry but some of them just keep on coming. At the moment, seven large airports in the UK, including major London airports, are still feeling threatened by possible strikes by 6,000 staff, all members of the Unite union.

Today, there was a piece of good news, as the union called off the first strike due to begin on Monday, January 7. But they have still two shutdowns scheduled, on January 14 and January 17.

The workers belonging to the Unite union, who are from a variety of occupations including stewards, clerical staff and security guards, are all upset about the possible closure of the staff pension scheme for BAA Airports - this is the company that operates the airports at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Southampton, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Seems like they were good enough to stay on board for the Christmas and New Year peak traveling season, but the goodwill is over now and these staff want their pension system.

So, if you have travel plans for the UK during the next potential strike dates, make sure you keep up to date with any possible cancellations or other changes that could occur.

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While a new year often brings the promise of fresh and exciting travel destinations and itineraries, there’s always somebody who decides to put a dampener on things. This year that role has fallen to Christopher Elliott at MSNBC who has created a list of 8 things travelers should expect in 2008: all of them bad.

Here’s a summary of the bad news for travelers in the coming year:

• There’ll be more so-called “convenience fees” (for example, paying an extra fee to ensure that the specific type of rental car you want will be available)
• There’ll be more energy surcharges - after all, it’s not the travel company’s fault that you’re damaging the environment by traveling
• Rental car prices will rise
• Road traffic problems in the United States will worsen (Elliott suggests using trains)
• Cruise costs will increase as cruise companies start charging more often for “extras” that used to be “included”
• Hotel room costs in the United States will rise - because there are too many travelers and not quite enough rooms
• Airlines will treat customers even worse - despite the pending introduction of a passengers bill of rights in the United States
• More travel company, airline and hotel mergers will reduce competition and make things worse for travelers

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Planning a cruise for 2008? There seem to have been a few cruise ship accidents during 2007, especially among Antarctic cruise lines, and the year finished with one more small incident.

A Norwegian cruise ship carrying 300 passengers of varying nationalities hit a glacier over the weekend in the Antarctic region. The MS Fram, which sails for the Hurtigruten cruise line, suffered a power outage of about 45 minutes and this meant the ship drifted into a glacier. The collision was relatively gentle and only a railing and one lifeboat were damaged, and all the passengers were unharmed - if a little nervous.

The good news for the passengers on the MS Fram was that after the power was restored and the ship moved safely away from the glacier, the captain announced that free drinks were available for everyone. The ship returned to anchor in an area free of ice, west of King George Island, and all passengers remained on board.

Hopefully 2008 will bring better luck to cruise ship passengers hoping to enjoy an incident-free journey - perhaps it would be nice to find more ships that throw in free drinks without having a crash first!

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From January 1, 2008, there’s one more thing to consider when packing your bags before a flight. The Department of Transport issued a directive, effective from the New Year, that loose lithium batteries will not be allowed in your checked baggage. Since lithium batteries are one of the most popular kinds of batteries used in portable electronic devices, this new rule could affect plenty of travelers.

This is not a terrorism-based threat - lithium batteries could apparently explode if overheated. Such a circumstance seems kind of unlikely, and even FAA safety testing found only that a problem would occur if an entire shipment of lithium batteries were overheated in the cargo hold, but the Department of Transport is playing it safe and banning loose lithium batteries.

So how does this affect you? The rules go like this:

• You can have lithium batteries in checked baggage if they are installed inside an electronic device
• If you use rechargeable lithium batteries and want to bring spares, there is a limit of two per passenger, and they must be in your carry-on luggage, in plastic bags.

The plastic bag rule is designed to keep batteries from forming circuits and thus having a higher risk of overheating; if you carry the battery in its original packaging, that has the same effect.

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Who has the best travel Web site?  J.D. Powers and Associates just published an independent survey of consumers to see which travel sites met with the greatest approval.

Criteria included price, ease of booking, usefulness of the information on the site, availability of booking options, ease of navigation, and appearance and design of the site. Sites were rated on a 1000-point scale, with 1000 being perfect. The results of major sites were:

• Hotwire.com - 815 points
• Travelocity - 808 points
• Expedia.com - 802 points
• Hotels.com - 796 points
• Priceline.com - 793 points
• Cheaptickets.com - 792 points
• Orbitz.com - 788 points

In addition, the survey found that 49 percent of all travel reservations in 2006 were made via the Internet, an increase from 46 percent in 2005.

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Sometimes it sounds like the newspapers send their journalists on Christmas vacation early and just recycle the headlines from the previous year: there are always a bunch of strikes and even more reliably terrible weather that makes traveling over the Christmas week a bit of a nightmare.

This time round we’ve already experienced snow and fog problems in the eastern coast of the United States. The wintry weather, combined with strong winds, led to some delayed and canceled flights and a whole lot of frustrated travelers over the weekend. Add to that the storms across the upper midwest, including parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and there were more than a few people who didn’t get to their Christmas destination as early as planned.

And this kind of Christmas chaos is definitely not exclusive to the US. Severe fog in Britain caused troubles for flights coming in and out of London’s two largest airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, with at least a hundred flights grounded. The fog also caused accidents and slowed traffic to a crawl on a lot of major motorways around Britain.

Is there somewhere in the world where travelers don’t suffer so badly during the holiday season? Well, the entire summer hemisphere manages to experience a summer Christmas, so the problems of fog and snow aren’t present there … but some cities in Australia are expecting maximum temperatures over 100 degrees F for Christmas Day, which brings its own set of problems.

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Traveling around through Europe is about to get even easier and quicker when the Schengen Zone expands on Friday December 21. The down side is you’ll get less stamps in your passport, but the big bonus is there’ll be a lot less waiting at border crossings.

What does it all mean? The Schengen Zone is a group of countries who have all signed the Schengen Agreement, which basically aims to abolish border controls between the countries. That means that across most of Europe now you can cross a border between a country and barely notice it – you won’t need to stop and show your passport or have your car searched, and if you’re not looking carefully at the signs you might miss the border.

But if you’re entering the Schengen area from parts of Europe that don’t belong to the agreement – for example, entering into Estonia from Russia, or entering into France from the United Kingdom, which hasn’t signed on – you might find the border controls even tougher. That’s because they’re now protecting an even greater area and number of countries, and nobody wants to be the guard responsible for missing a case of people trafficking, drug smuggling or illegal import of cigarettes or other goods.

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