Online Travel Guide, The Best Travel Blog Site

Archive for February, 2010

A survey has found that Moscow, Abu Dhabi, and New York City have the world’s most expensive hotel rooms.

According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the Russian capital topped the list of the world’s most expensive hotel rooms last year, reports the New York Daily News.

Even though there was a worldwide decrease in hotel rates in 2009 due to the shaky economy, the average cost of a room in a Moscow hotel was a whopping 420 dollars a night.

Abu Dhabi, the overdeveloped capital city of the United Arab Emirates, was the second-most expensive, with a room costing about 350 dollars per night, on average.

New York City, which is famous for its sky-high luxury hotel rates, came in third with a room costing about 320 dollars per night, despite most Manhattan hotels lowering their price last year.

The survey, conducted by Hogg Robinson Group, an international corporate travel services company, found that average room rates dropped in most cities last year.

With people taking less vacations and business cutting travel costs, most hotels offered discounts to lure travellers.

The average cost of a room in New York in 2008 was 415 dollars, which was about 23 percent higher than last year.

Among the top 10 most-expensive cities in the survey, Paris was fourth, at 320 dollars a night, about the same as it was in 2008.

The only other U.S. city in the top 10 was Washington, which cost about 285 dollars to rent a room. (ANI)

LONDON: A 46-year-old farmer in Austria is horrified at the findings of a DNA test which confirm that he is one of the last surviving relatives of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The man, thought to be a cousin of the former German dictator, is a resident of Waldviertel — a remote area in Austria which was once home to Hitler’s grandmother Anna Schicklgruber, father Alois and mother Klara.

The hidden secret came to light after a Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders — who had previously garnered some Hitler DNA covertly by taking a serviette dropped by one of three known Hitler descendants — persuaded the farmer to take a mouth swap test.

Mulders said he had no reason to doubt the findings. But he added: “I wish I had never done this. Hitler for me was the biggest criminal of all time – there is no argument about that.

“I did the test without really thinking and regret it now,” he said.

Further to add to the mystery, the farmer from Waldviertel is not the only surviving relative of the Fuehrer.

There are as many as 39 others who also live in the same region, the Daily Mail reported.

After the end of the World War II, those who bore the name Hitler discarded it or changed it to Hiedler or Huettler. Many families in the region still carry the changed names and it was going through these names in a phone book that Mulders came upon the man related to the Fuehrer.