I just received this year's free cruise voucher from the Ramada Plaza Resort in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. That’s for a two day cruise and a $1,300 voucher so I can buy more time and somehow I can also win trips to Las Vegas and Puerto Vallarta. This is one of the annual promotions that in the small print say they are going to try and sell you something like a vacation property. How this will work this year in the States remains to be seen. They really want to sell you an expensive vacation. It gets a bad rating from the U.S. Better Business Bureau every year and yet it keeps ticking. I am really telling you to stay away from this promotion...

In the Central Okanagan there are now 422 homes listed for sale at $1 million plus and so far in 2008 there have been 79 homes sold in that range...

One of my readers sent me an email about another way to handle a no call list. It was ioptout.ca and that immediately had a warning box that stated “Uses an invalid security certificate. The Certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.” I have never seen anything like this before. First of all I don’t know who these people are. Let’s do some checking...

Are you paying for insurance on your credit card balance that you didn’t even know you had purchased? I didn’t know telemarketers sold it. It is not a large fee so it could go by without you checking. Credit balance insurance is supposed to protect you if for some reason you can’t make your payments because of illness. I believe it is good for three payments and if permanent it has to be a disease like cancer and not skin cancer that isn’t maybe enough of problem. Check it out...

One of the Okanagan’s main connections to the U.S., Horizon Air's daily flights out of Kelowna to Seattle, may have some delays in converting to a single type fleet. Horizon Air's plans to use only a single aircraft type in its fleet have been delayed due to issues in the credit and aircraft markets.

Horizon plans to retire both its 37-seat Q200 turboprops and its 70-seat CRJ-700 jets and replace them with Q-400 turboprops that seat 76 passengers.
However, the airline is finding that its 20 CRJs aren't selling well because of paralysis in the credit markets and tough times in the travel business. The airline said its believes it has found a new home for two of the jets, but interest in the other 18 so far hasn't been keen.

Horizon said it may ask Canadian manufacturer Bombardier to delay scheduled deliveries of the new aircraft to Horizon until the airline can dispose of more of the jets.