Hops To It And Reserve A Spot At Beer Camp

Not your usual weekend on tap: that’s Beer Camp, from Sept. 29 through Oct. 1, in Fort Mitchell, Ky.

The three-day event brings beer enthusiasts to taste hundreds of microbrewed beers, tour the American Museum of Brewing History and Arts and hear beer anthropologist Alan Eames (“the Indiana Jones of beer”) on his search for the origins of beer.

Cost is $330 per person for the weekend, double occupancy, including all activities, and all meals except Friday dinner. Information: (800) 426-3841.

Safety first: A new service provides up-to-date safety and security recommendations for more than 275 cities around the world.

The one-page advisories, which also contain basic health and medical care information, are free through travel agencies that use Sabre, the nation’s biggest reservations system.

The Travel Watch advisories are from Kroll Associates, a New York company that provides risk assessment information to multinational corporations.

“We’ll be tapping into that large investigative network,” said Alice T. McGillion, president of Travel Watch. “Our advisories will tell travelers such things as the safest way to get from the airport to the city center, and what sections to avoid in town.”

Weaving a web: Holiday Inn, the world’s biggest single hotel brand with almost 2,000 properties, has become the first hotel company to offer reservation booking capability live on the Internet.

Customers with access to the World Wide Web can book reservations directly with a credit card (http://www.holiday-inn.com).

Preferred Hotels and Resorts, the Chicago-based association of 107 independent luxury hotels around the world, will become the first group of independent hotels to establish its own directory on TravelWeb when it goes on-line in August (http://www.travelweb.com/ preferred).

Its members include the Peninsula Group, with hotels in New York, Beverly Hills, Calif., Hong Kong and Manila; the Palace Hotel in Beijing; the Windsor Court in New Orleans; the Hotel Ritz in Paris and the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas.

A place to work: Overseas travelers often must conduct business in a client’s office or even their hotel room, but American-style business centers have begun popping up in foreign countries.

The centers are equipped with computers, fax machines, voice-mail systems and copiers, and staffed by multilingual receptionists. Some also have E-mail capability and videoconferencing, and almost all the centers can be rented by the hour, day, month or even indefinitely.

HQ Business Centers of San Francisco, the world leader, has 150 franchised centers in 15 countries, including such major financial centers as Munich, Germany; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Toronto and Vancouver in Canada; Mexico City; Madrid and London.

Gamesmanship: The 2002 winter Olympic Games are still a long way off, but Salt Lake City, the host city, is already preparing. Its airport international arrivals building opened in July and a new runway will be ready by next year.

Despite being the 23rd busiest airport in the United States and 38th in the world, with 17 million passengers a year, Salt Lake City International Airport has no direct scheduled international service - its name refers to charter flights.

However, it has applied for service to London, Mexico City and Vancouver, and Barbara Gann, an airport spokeswoman, said it was confident of eventual approval.

Meanwhile, although Salt Lake City is served by 10 carriers, Delta dominates that market, with 168 daily flights plus another 81 with Sky West, its commuter partner.

“Since Delta is headquartered in Atlanta, and the summer Olympics will be held there next summer, we’re hoping Delta will have some lessons to teach us,” said Gann.