Hotels.com®, the expert in online hotel booking and home to more than 20,000 hotel destinations worldwide, released its biannual Hotel Price Index™ (HPI®), reporting on the most popular travel destinations and the average price paid by travelers while visiting those destinations.
The HPI is a regular survey of hotel prices in major city destinations across the world, based on hotels.com bookings. Prices reported are those actually paid by customers (rather than advertised rates) during the calendar year of 2011. On a global scale, hotel prices increased by 4 percent on average in 2011 over 2010, while average prices in North America increased 5 percent year-over-year, continuing the process of steady recovery from the lows of 2008. Entering the third consecutive year of moderate price rises for guests, the global average price is still lower than it was in 2005, such was the depth of the financial crash-inspired trough.
To view Multimedia News Release, go to http://www.multivu.com/mnr/52873-hotels-com-price-index-five-percent-rise-in-2011-in-north-america
I Blame the Insurance Companies and Their Agents for Not Thoroughly Explaining -- and Urging You to Buy -- the Most Important Insurance Protection Available in Texas
(They Won’t Tell You, So We Will!)
An early crop of advanced crash avoidance technologies includes some clear success stories when it comes to preventing crashes, insurance claim analyses by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) show.
Forward collision avoidance systems, particularly those that can brake autonomously, along with adaptive headlights, which shift direction as the driver steers, show the biggest crash reductions. Lane departure warning appears to hurt, rather than help, though it’s not clear why, and other systems, such as blind spot detection and park assist, aren’t showing clear effects on crash patterns yet.
HLDI analysts looked at how each feature affected claim frequency under a variety of insurance coverages for damage and injuries. Clear patterns were seen in claims under property damage liability (PDL) insurance, which covers damage caused by the insured vehicle to another vehicle, and collision insurance, which covers damage to the insured vehicle. Frequency is measured as the number of claims relative to the number of insured vehicle years. An insured vehicle year is one vehicle insured for one year, two vehicles for six months, etc. The model years of the vehicles included ranged from 2000 to 2011, depending on when an automaker introduced a feature. Insurance data through August 2011 were used.
Only 3 of 11 midsize luxury and near-luxury cars evaluated earn good or acceptable ratings in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s new small overlap frontal crash test, the latest addition to a suite of tests designed to help consumers pick the safest vehicles.
Wirkungsvolle Schutzsysteme für Motorradfahrer zu entwickeln, ist höchst kompliziert. Anders als im Auto können die Bewegungen des Fahrers bei einem Motorrad-Crash nur schwer vorausberechnet werden. Schutzsysteme direkt am Körper des Motorradfahrers sind deshalb die beste Möglichkeit, schwerste und tödliche Verletzungen zu verhindern oder zumindest zu reduzieren. Aus diesem Grund hat der ADAC zwei sogenannte Airbagwesten im Crash-Verhalten getestet.
Modern semitrailers for the most part do a good job of keeping passenger vehicles from sliding underneath them, greatly increasing the chances of surviving a crash into the back of a large truck, recent tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) show. But in crashes involving only a small portion of the truck’s rear, most trailers fail to prevent potentially deadly underride.
Earlier research showed that the minimum strength and dimensions required for underride guards are inadequate, prompting the Institute to petition the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2011 for tougher standards. The Institute also asked the agency to consider applying the standards to other types of large trucks, such as dump trucks that aren’t required to have any underride guards.
The 2014 Subaru Forester is the first vehicle to ace every aspect of the challenging small overlap front crash test conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The Forester, the only 1 of 13 small SUVs to earn an overall rating of good in the test, and the 2013 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport, which earns acceptable, are the latest vehicles to qualify for the Institute’s recently inaugurated top honor, TOP SAFETY PICK+. Each of the other 11 SUVs earns either a poor or marginal rating.
