Storm Floris to Cause UK Travel Disruption as Wind Warnings Upgraded
Amber warnings have been issued for much of Scotland, lasting from 10am to 10pm.
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Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Winners Revealed: Trip.com Group's Tourism Innovation Awards Celebrate Immersive, Sustainable & Culture-Rich Travel
From panda celebrities to virtual pop concerts, the awarded experiences span from across the globe including Asia, Middle East and Europe SINGAPORE, Aug. 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Group today announced the final winners of its Tourism Innovation Awards, recognising trailblazing projects that are driving tourism growth globally. From sustainability-driven design to immersive technology and cultural heritage, the winning projects give a glimpse of the future of travel – reflecting a growing demand for unique experiences that stretch beyond the usual travel checklist. Immersive Technology Captivates Global Audiences Across the globe, attractions are leveraging technology to push the boundaries of traditional art and entertainment, delivering powerful multi-sensory experiences. Winning the Tourism Innovation Award for their technological innovation are the: Afterlife show at the Sphere in Las Vegas, the ABBA Voyage concert in London and teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM in Tokyo. Popular for its immersive, interactive art installations utilising technology, teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM has become a must-visit destination for art enthusiasts and tech lovers. It is ranked as one of the top night attractions in Tokyo on a data-backed and expert-curated list of travel rankings around the world. The success of these technology-led attractions highlights the growing appeal of immersive experiences as travellers look for destinations that not only provide entertainment, but also a greater sense of exploration and creativity. Social Media Trends Fuel Tourism Social media trends are taking the world by storm and spurring people to chase the moments they've seen online via travel. From the stunning "forest of book walls" design of Seoul's Starfield Library, to the adorable Giant pandas in Chengdu and the iconic Platform 9¾ at King's Cross Station in London – these viral trends and locations have won the Tourism Innovation Award for drawing tourists worldwide through their massive following on social media, pushing cultural tourism to a new front. For example, fans all over the world have flocked to Chengdu to catch a glimpse of the famous Giant pandas, while also driving consumption for panda-related merchandise. This trend highlights the influence of social media in shaping travel decisions, as tourists seek destinations that offer both memorable experiences and shareable moments, illustrating how digital buzz can fuel real-world popularity and economic impact. Demand for Innovative Sustainable Travel Responsible travel continues to stay top-of-mind and an important factor in destination choices. Group's latest consumer report shows that global travellers are placing most emphasis on the environmental and cultural aspects of their travel experiences[1], among other concerns such as economic impact and wildlife protection. In Saudi Arabia, two projects – Shebara Resort and DesertxAIUla – have been recognised with the Tourism Innovation Award for their focus on sustainability innovation, offering unique travel experiences with minimal environmental impact. Shebara Resort's suspended spherical villas hover above coral reefs to reduce ecological disruption, achieving both luxury aesthetics and a reduced impact on the natural landscape. Meanwhile, Desert×AlUla, an open-air art exhibition in Saudi Arabia's ancient desert region, invites artists to create works that engage with AIUla's natural landscapes, promoting dialogue on conservation and attracting interest from audiences worldwide. These attractions support the demand for travel experiences with lesser environmental impact and provide a success model for sustainable tourism growth. Search for Deeper Cultural Exchanges Old is gold – modern travellers are searching for deeper and more authentic experiences of culture and history, fuelling a demand for cultural heritage tourism. A winner of the Tourism Innovation Awards, Dollywood Park in USA allows visitors to explore the charm of Tennessee through traditional performances and local cuisine while enjoying thrilling rides. Its unique blend of entertainment and culture has attracted many visitors, and the park is ranked as one of the top best things to do in Tennessee on List of Global Winners In no particular order, the global winners of Group's Tourism Innovation Awards are: Afterlife Show at the Sphere, Las Vegas, United States Starfield Library, Seoul, South Korea Dollywood, Pigeon Forge, United States Shebara Resort, Umluj, Saudi Arabia teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM, Tokyo, Japan King's Cross Station, London, United Kingdom Desert x AIUIa, al-Ula, Saudi Arabia Grand Egyptian Museum, Giza, Egypt Panda Family Wins Hearts Worldwide, Chengdu, China ABBA Voyage, London, United Kingdom Each winning project will receive a USD $60,000 prize for their contributions to the travel and tourism industry. About Group's Tourism Innovation Awards Announced by Group at its Envision 2025 Global Partner Conference, the Tourism Innovation Awards is part of the Group's larger initiative to drive industry progress through recognising and supporting outstanding ideas that have redefined the way people travel. With a total prize pool of USD $1.4 million, the awards aim to honour breakthroughs in tourism around the world that have displayed exceptional innovation, sustainability and scalability. More details on the global finalists can be found here. About Group Group is a leading global travel service provider comprising of Ctrip, Skyscanner, and Qunar. Across its platforms, Group helps travellers around the world make informed and cost-effective bookings for travel products and services and enables partners to connect their offerings with users through the aggregation of comprehensive travel-related content and resources, and an advanced transaction platform consisting of apps, websites and 24/7 customer service centres. Founded in 1999 and listed on NASDAQ in 2003 and HKEX in 2021, Group has become one of the best-known travel groups in the world, with the mission "to pursue the perfect trip for a better world". Find out more about Group here: Follow us on: X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. [1] Based on Group's 2024 Sustainable Travel Consumer Report polling 9,867 survey samples from 109 countries and territories across four regions. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Group Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
The real reason weather forecasters (like me) often appear to get it wrong
Sometimes I'll be walking around a supermarket, and a shopper will approach me in the aisle. "I hosted a barbecue on Saturday and you told me it was going to rain," they will say. "And it didn't. Why did you get it wrong?". Or the opposite: they planned for a day of sunshine, only to be disappointed by grey skies. Or a parent might ask me in March what the weather might be like for their son's wedding - in September. Those people are always delightfully friendly, and the conversations are part of what makes presenting the weather - which I've been doing for the last three decades - such a joy. But they also shed light on a strange fact. Over my career, forecasting has improved almost beyond recognition. We can now predict the weather with much higher accuracy, and in more granular detail, than when I began presenting in the mid 1990s. Liz Bentley, a professor of meteorology at Reading University and chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, says that a one-day forecast is correct over 90% of the time. But despite those strides, there are still gaps in public trust. When YouGov asked British adults last summer whether they trusted the weather forecast, a substantial minority - 37% - said they didn't trust it "very much" or "at all." (Reassuringly, 61% said they did trust forecasters like me.) Jokes about the forecast are widespread. The 2012 Olympics opening ceremony included a clip of the moment from 1987, when the weather forecaster Michael Fish told viewers not to worry because there wouldn't be a hurricane - only for a storm to hit hours later. (As it happens, Michael was correct: hurricane-strength winds did strike southeast England that night, but it wasn't technically a hurricane.) Still, the incident became a byword for forecaster error. So why, with our wealth of knowledge and our powerful forecasting technology, do some people still perceive the weather as incorrect? And do we really get it wrong or is something more complicated at play around how we share forecasts? Great accuracy - and great expectations Part of the challenge is around expectations, which have risen in our world of round-the-clock access to information. We can tweak the temperature of our fridge or identify a problem in our car from our smartphones in a fraction of a second. So why can't we find out whether it's going to rain on our street at 2pm on Sunday with 100% accuracy - surely, an easier feat? Another part of the challenge is how that wealth of information is boiled down and communicated. Meteorology produces an overwhelming amount of data; it's difficult to condense it into a snappy, TV or digital app-friendly prediction. It means that even when we are technically correct, some viewers might still end up confused. But the answer also lies in the tricky nature of meteorology. It's a delicate science, and any tiny inaccuracy in the data can skew things - or knock it out of shape. Every day, across the British Isles, forecasters collect "observations" (or data) on things like temperature and wind speed, through a network of more than 200 "weather stations" run by the Met Office. The data is then plugged into mathematical models run by powerful machines, or "supercomputers". Earlier this year the Met Office unveiled a new supercomputer, switching for the first time from a physical machine to cloud-based software. The new device will deliver "better forecasts and help scientists advance important climate research around the world", the Met Office says. But as with any science, there are weaknesses. Chaos Theory: when weather goes wrong The atmosphere is known as a "chaotic system", meaning that a slight error - even as small as 0.01C - in the initial observations can produce a drastically different result. "It's called Chaos Theory," explains Prof Bentley. "Or the Butterfly Effect. The analogy is that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it could have an impact on the atmosphere across northern Europe, six days later." There's also a particular challenge when predicting the weather over small geographic areas. In the 1990s, a weather event needed to be larger than about 100 miles (161km) before it could be fully observed - now, the UK-wide weather model used by the Met Office can map weather events as small as 2 miles (3km), Prof Bentley says. But zooming in beyond that size remains difficult, so predicting weather like heavy fog - which might affect only a 1km space - is particularly tricky. And even with huge improvements in the science, technology glitches still happen - though these are mercifully rare. Last autumn, the BBC Weather website briefly showed impossibly fast winds of over 13,000mph in London, as well as temperatures of 404C in Nottingham. The BBC apologised for "an issue with some of the weather data from our forecast provider". The trouble with boiling down data The biggest challenge of my job is synthesising this data so it fits into a tight television segment. "There's no other science as tested, checked and judged by the general public," says Scott Hosking, a director of environmental forecasting at the Alan Turing Institute. "It's as complex as nuclear fusion physics, but most of us don't experience that day to day, and so we don't have to come up with a way to communicate that science to the public." It's also easy to forget that forecasting is just that - predicting. Over the years, we've gotten a lot better at this subtle art of "communicating uncertainty". Meteorologists now produce "ensemble forecasts", where they might run 50 different models, all with slight variations. If all of those scenarios point to a similar outcome, meteorologists can be confident they've got it right. If they produce different outcomes, then their confidence is much lower. This is why, on a weather app, you might see a 10% chance of rain in your area. Time to rethink forecasts? Forecasters often think about this tricky issue of communication; how the weather can be more easily explained. Last week, the BBC announced a new partnership with the Met Office. It came eight years after they officially ended their relationship (since 2018, the Dutch MeteoGroup has provided the BBC's forecasts). The new deal aims to combine expertise of the two organisations and "turn science into stories," explained Tim Davie, the BBC's director-general. Certainly, some think more creativity is needed in communicating the weather. Dr Hosking of the Alan Turing Institute suggests forecasters could move away from giving a percentage chance of rain, and instead use the "storyline approach". In this style, forecasters could say things like, "What we're seeing now is similar to what we saw at a certain event a few years ago' - something within memory." This is partly why the Met Office, in 2015, decided to name storms. But Prof Bentley argues that numbers can be powerful - and perhaps it's better to arm consumers with the hard data they need. In the US, she says, the weather forecast has percentages "everywhere"; American consumers are told of everything from chance of rain, to the likely spread in temperature. "The public are comfortable [with it]," she says. "Because they've had that information given to them so often, they kind of get it." The new weather super predictor Weather forecasting could soon change dramatically with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The use of machine learning to predict the weather has developed rapidly in recent months. It's often said that forecasters have gained 24 hours of accuracy with each passing decade, meaning the Met Office can now release a weather warning seven days in advance. But AI models designed by Google DeepMind are already correctly predicting the weather 15 days in advance, Dr Hosking says. Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Cambridge University released a fully AI-driven weather programme called Aardvark Weather. The results were written in the Nature journal. Whilst traditional forecasting requires hours of use on a powerful supercomputer, researchers say, Aardvark can be deployed on a desktop computer in minutes. They claim this uses "thousands of times" less computing power, and that it can predict the weather in more granular detail. They also claim it will improve forecasts in west Africa and other poor regions (the best traditional forecasting models are mostly designed for Europe and the United States). "It could be transformational; it's super exciting," says Richard Turner, professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, who is one of the designers of the model. But Prof Bentley identifies a weakness in AI-driven weather models: they are fed with reams of historic data, and trained to spot patterns - which in her view makes it very difficult to predict events that haven't happened yet. "With climate change, we're going to see new records," she says. "We may see 41C in the UK. But if AI is always looking backwards, it will never see 41 because we've not had it yet." Prof Turner accepts that this is a challenge with AI models like his and says his team is working on remedies. The 'so what' factor In the future, analysts think, forecasts will go into more depth. Rather than just predicting rain, the forecast will increasingly tell you what effect that rain will have - on your travel, or on your garden plans. Prof Bentley calls this the "so what" factor. "Do you put something on [a weather app] that says, 'If you're planning a barbecue, then you might want to do it at lunchtime because the chances are you're going to get washed out in the afternoon'?" This chimes with a trend I've noticed from my own career: a growing interest in understanding the science behind the weather. Viewers are no longer just interested in knowing whether there'll be a heatwave; they want to know why. That's the reason we publish more content explaining the physics of the aurora borealis, or why climate change is leading to bigger hailstones. As for AI, it certainly could improve accuracy - but there's a risk, also, that viewers become deluged by information. Dr Hosking says that because AI is more nimble and can tweak weather models more quickly, users will soon have access to frequently-changing forecasts. They may also have "much more localised" information, he says (perhaps giving data not just on your town, but on your back garden, other analysts predict). This could lead to an overwhelming amount of data for those using the app, gluing users to their smartphones. And in that world, it will become even more important for human forecasters to communicate the weather in a clear, understandable way. But there are upsides too - not least the prospect of much longer-term, more accurate forecasts. Perhaps one day, when a mother asks me to predict weather at her son's wedding six months from now, I might be able to give a slightly better answer. Additional reporting: Luke Mintz More from InDepth Why plane turbulence is becoming more frequent - and more severe The sale of illegal cigarettes signals a deeper problem with UK high streets How the rise of green tech is feeding another environmental crisis BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Best places in Britain to buy a cottage revealed
With their quirkiness and charm, living in a cottage is a dream for many people, and analysis by a property website has pinpointed locations in Britain where home buyers are most likely to snap one up at a bargain price. North Lanarkshire in Scotland topped Zoopla's affordability list, with a cottage typically priced at £83,500. This is followed by Sunderland in the North East of England where those looking for a cottage could expect to pay an average of £115,000. The 'cottagecore' aesthetic that romanticises rural life and encourages simple living and traditional skills has become a popular trend in recent years. Some cottage buyers may also have inspiration from the cosy, rural home depicted in romantic comedy film The Holiday, starring Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz. Zoopla said that 'cottage' was the fourth most-searched for term on its website in 2024. Among those aiming for a lifestyle brimming with bucolic bliss, the analysis reveals where this is translating into market demand for cottages. In the North West of England, Blackburn with Darwen is a hotspot for buyer inquiries, with an average asking price for a cottage at £157,500, Zoopla said. It added that Southampton leads the way in the South East, with a median average asking price of £280,000. Other areas attracting significant attention include East Renfrewshire in Scotland, where a cottage has an average asking price of £100,000, Zoopla said. Neath Port Talbot in Wales appeals to buyers drawn to its beautiful coastal and valley landscapes, with an average price tag of £170,000, the website added. Bradford in West Yorkshire is another hotspot, with an average asking price of £200,000. Buyers are attracted by its rich industrial history, cultural scene and some of the most affordable prices in the region, according to Zoopla. For those looking for choice, Derbyshire Dales has the biggest proportion of cottages for sale, with around a fifth (21.4%) of homes on the market being cottages, the website's analysis found. Daniel Copley, a consumer expert at Zoopla, said: 'Our data shows a clear and sustained appetite for the cottagecore lifestyle, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. 'While the dream of a quaint, rural cottage is often associated with high prices, our analysis highlights that affordability can still be found across the country. From the rolling hills of North Lanarkshire to the coastal charm of Sunderland, there are options for prospective buyers on a range of budgets. 'We're seeing this desire for a simpler life translate into market demand, with specific areas becoming hotspots for buyer interest. Whether you're a first-time buyer or looking for a change of pace, the cottage market offers diverse opportunities.' Nigel Bishop, founder of buying agency Recoco Property Search, said: 'There has always been a fan base of buyers who appreciate the typically charming designs and quaint surroundings associated with a cottage. 'Many house hunters also express favouring this style of home for size as cottages tend to be smaller than typical country homes and are therefore considered to be more manageable and could reduce running costs. 'Often set in rural locations, buyers need to ensure that the setting works for them long term, as some amenities such as shops and hospitals can be further away which can become inconvenient. 'Demand for cottages remains strong, however, and house hunters should brace for a competitive property search – particularly for cottages with a lower asking price as they tend to attract multiple offers.' Zoopla analysed homes available for sale between January and May 2025, with London generally excluded. Here are the areas in regions and nations of Britain where cottages are typically the least expensive, according to Zoopla. The figures show the median average asking price for a cottage: East Midlands, Amber Valley, £206,000 East of England, Fenland, £249,000 North East, Sunderland, £115,000 North West, Blackburn with Darwen, £157,500 Scotland, North Lanarkshire, £83,500 South East, Southampton, £280,000 South West, Plymouth, £248,500 Wales, Rhondda Cynon Taf, £129,500 West Midlands, Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme, £238,000 Yorkshire and the Humber, Bradford, £200,000 Here are the areas in regions and nations of Britain where cottages are typically the most expensive, according to Zoopla. The figures show the median average asking price for a cottage: East Midlands, South Northamptonshire and Gedling, £400,000 East of England, Welwyn Hatfield, £662,500 North East, Northumberland, £300,000 North West, Cheshire West and Chester, £375,000 Scotland, East Lothian, £381,000 South East, Slough, £824,500 South West, Gloucester, £531,500 Wales, Monmouthshire, £442,500 West Midlands, North Warwickshire, £615,000 Yorkshire and the Humber, York, £400,000 Here are the areas in each region or nation where cottages are attracting the biggest concentrations of buyer inquiries, according to Zoopla, with the median average asking price of a cottage: Scotland, East Renfrewshire, £100,000 Wales, Neath Port Talbot, £170,000 Yorkshire and the Humber, Bradford, £200,000 South East, Southampton, £280,000 North East, Sunderland, £115,000 West Midlands, Stoke-on-Trent, £238,000 South West, Plymouth, £248,500 East of England, Hertsmere, £485,000 East Midlands, Leicester, £325,000 North West, Blackburn with Darwen, £157,500
