Our top travel stories of the week

We know it’s hard for owners to stay on top of developments in the travel market so we’ve decided to start publishing the stories that have caught our eye in the past seven days. Don’t forget we also publish useful stories and links on twitter. Follow us @espanabreaks to see what we’re looking at throughout the week.

Statistic of the week

We did a post on the uplift we’ve seen from social networks but this stat illustrates it beautifully. This 1 bed apartment in Lanzarote turned a few shares into a deluge of eyeballs – their availability calendar looks pretty good too! Great work.

In the news

Spanish holidays provide best value for Britons – it’s been a good year so far for polls showing Spain is still a firm favourite for us Brits. This one’s from The Post Office’s annual Holiday Money Report (via The Telegraph)

Britons still holidaying but want more for less, shows study – more figures re-affirming our own predictions for 2012. People are still holidaying but with budgets under pressure, they are looking for value (via Travel Weekly)

Vueling to fly new routes out of Cardiff Airport – the Spanish low cost airline is adding three times-a-week services to Alicante and Palma, Mallorca, from June (via Wales Online)

Petition demands return of Ryanair Ibiza winter subsidy – a decision by the Balearic Islands tourism minister to withdraw a €365,000 winter flights subsidy has been met with a furious Facebook campaign (via Travel Weekly)

Wills and Harry hunt boar on secret holiday to Spain – the boys celebrate the end of Harry’s helicopter training in Cordoba (via Mail Online)

Lanzarote wine gets the thumbs up – an island famed for volcanoes is producing wine good enough to make it into the New York Times (via Lanzarote Information)

I tripped into the lifeboat, says Costa Captain – the Costa Concordia disaster hasn’t done much for the cruise market with the actions of the captain sounding increasingly suspect (via TravelMole)

SOPA protests working, PIPA still at large – this isn’t strictly a travel story but we’ll explain its importance to you: The US is considering two anti-piracy bills called SOPA and PIPA whose implications could be very damaging to the web. Should these laws pass, a single copyright infringing photo on a website could result in the entire site being de-listed from Google and, if based in the US, a complete shutdown.

How’s that affect you? Imagine another advertiser uploaded a photo in error that breached copyright – something we can’t police (but can react to if reported). The entire site could be knobbled, without due process or timely recourse. While the ideas behind SOPA/PIPA are laudible, it’s badly drafted law with horrendous implications for the web.

Lots of websites temporarily closed on Wednesday in protest, notably Wikipedia. It seems to be working. (via TechCrunch)

Meanwhile we couldn’t resist a gratuitous image of PIPA…