At Thanksgiving dinner a year ago with our friends Vicki and Stewart, we heard about the 14-day Baltic cruise that they had just signed up for on the Celebrity Eclipse of Celebrity Cruises (800/647-2251, www.celebrity cruises.com). It included ports that my husband, Jerry, and I wanted to see, such as St. Petersburg, Russia, and Tallinn, Estonia, so we  considered joining them.

I did have some qualms about the size of the ship (2,850 passengers), but the price ($1,714 per person...

A subscriber recommended the apart’hotel Citadines Sainte-Catherine Brussels (www.citadines.com), in Belgium, noting “Citadines is a new chain of hotels” (March ’16, pg. 49). A minor observation — Citadines is not a new chain; it’s been around for at least 20 years* that I personally know of, maybe longer.

In May 2016, I stayed at the Citadines Opéra in the 2nd Arrondissement in Paris and loved the place. Because I booked early, the cost was around...

My wife, Debby, and I are on an 18-month tour of Europe, and we wanted to share some travel snippets with fellow ITN readers. 

• On April 12, 2016, we flew from Dallas/Forth Worth to London’s Heathrow Airport. Flying American Airlines in first class, shortly before we landed we were given a little ticket to fill out that enabled us to skip the Immigration line at Heathrow.

• Our round-trip first-class flight ended up costing us very little because in 2014...