Travel Maven Blog ...... David Molyneaux posts from TheTravelMavens.com

Travel pubs, Rainforest storyteller top Lowell Thomas Awards

BILOXI, Miss.

Afar magazine, Travel + Leisure and the Los Angeles Times were the top winners in the 2013 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition.

Mary Jo McConahay, author, freelance writer, blogger and documentary filmmaker, is the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year for a portfolio of her work that included exceptional storytelling in “Maya Roads: One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest.”

The Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Virtuoso Life magazine won awards as the best travel print publications in North America.

Forty-eight (48) publishers, both in print and online, along with six broadcasts and six books, took honors.

“It is the most diverse group of travel journalists, publications and websites in the history of the Lowell Thomas contest,” said David Molyneaux, SATW Foundation president.

Popular cruising vacations began with ‘The Love Boat’

The original Pacific Princess, a cruise ship that was towed this summer to Turkey to be dismantled for scrap, once was a sparkling television star.

Though the show was a somewhat soppy sitcom called “The Love Boat,” it was so popular that it added the word “cruise” to the vacation dreams of millions of Americans.

The Pacific Princess in 2000

“The Love Boat” was the tipping point, the fulcrum that transformed the entire cruise industry, said longtime Carnival Cruise Lines executive Bob Dickinson during a recent interview with TheTravelMavens.com.

“That show put cruising on the map,” said Dickinson. “It moved cruising into the national psyche.”