Here at your-hols.com, we love travel so much, we decided to start compiling some most amazing travel facts, the mind boggling numbers that allow us to fly, sail or drive to the most extreme places that our forefathers could never have imagined.
Journeys
In 2010, Swiss boffins plotted the 93,000 flights that departed the world’s 9,000 airports in a day. The results can be seen in the video above.
© Nblue | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images
The total length of the world’s coastline is around 350,016km (217,490 miles), or to put it another way, roughly equal to the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
A single, long-haul Boeing 747 has more than 40,000 items loaded on to it before it flies. All together these items weigh six metric tonnes and occupy a space of 60m3. Items include meals, toilet bags, duty-free goods, first aid boxes, newspapers and headsets.
The longest commercial non-stop flight in the world was the Singapore Airlines‘ all-business class Newark (New Jersey/New York) to Singapore flight. It covered the 15,345km (9,535 miles) in 18hours and 40 minutes but ended in November 2013, when the longest non-stop flight became Qantas’s Sydney to Dallas service, which is 15hours and 25 minutes long and covers 13,804km (8,578 miles).
Travel from Europe to Asia without leaving the same country on the world’s longest train journey The Trans-Siberian Express. The 9259km Moscow-Vladivostok route takes 178 hours (seven days) and has 67 stops.
Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Sea is the largest cruise ship in the world. it is 362m (1,187ft) long and weighs 225,282 tonnes – that’s 37 times the length of the average male killer whale, and 38,000 times its average weight. It is followed by Royal Caribbean’s Oasis which is 5cm shorter. Allure carries 6,318 people – or the entire population of Bagshot in Surrey.
Quark Expedition’s 128-passenger expedition vessel 50 Years of Victory has nuclear-powered capabilities to go through 10 feet of ice and makes the voyage to the North Pole – the furthest north a cruise ship sails.
Where to stay
According to STR Global, there are 187,000 hotels in the world with more than 17.5 million rooms. Assuming they are mainly doubles, they could house the entire population of Canada.
Eighteen of the top 30 largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas, which is the city with the world’s most hotel rooms (136733 in 2008). Paris has more than 150,000 hotel rooms, but only around 79,000 are in the city, the rest are in the Greater Paris area.
You might not have to wait long for a room when checking into the Izmailovo Hotel in Moscow. The world’s largest hotel has a whopping 7,500 rooms over four buildings. We wouldn’t fancy waiting in line for an orange juice on the breakfast buffet though.
The Bridge Suite at Atlantis Paradise Island in The Bahamas, costs $25,000 a night to hire out, one of the most expensive hotel rooms in the world. It consists of two bedrooms, private butler service, a 22-karat gold chandelier, a 2,500 square foot entertainment center and an 800 square foot balcony.
The Swedish Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi was the first and largest ice hotel in the world. It uses 1,000 tonnes of ice and 30,000m3 of SNICE (a mixture of snow and ice from the Torne River.
Doubletree by Hilton gives each guest who checks in a signature warm chocolate cookie. More than quarter of a million are handed out each year – they contain 385,554kg (850,000lbs) of chocolate chips.
The Sheraton Macau Hotel has installed 90,796 light bulbs in the guest rooms, that’s more than 4.5 times the total number of light bulbs to light the Eiffel Tower!
Posh hotel chain Hastings Hotels orders 180,000 rubber ducks each year for guests at its six properties in Northern Ireland. The total cost is around £200,000.
The Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin is a hotel famed for holding posh functions in the German capital. It once held a bash that required a special table cloth to be made… it measured a whopping 220m2.
The Ultimate Alaskan Lodge is set in 13,000 million acres of land – a huge national park that stretches across Alaska, from Canada’s Yukon to the Pacific. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is part of the largest protected land mass on earth and the nearest road is a hundred miles away.
On changeover day at Center Parcs five woodland villages, staff change 12,000 beds in four hours – that is 40 beds a minute.
South Africa’s Sun City International has the fastest, highest and longest zip wire in the world. It is 2km long, 280m high and people who take the plunge reach an average speed of 120 km/h.
According to Virgin Holidays research, the towels laid down by UK holidaymakers over a summer would cover an area three times the size of Disneyland. Worryingly, we waste 1.8million holiday hours looking for somewhere to put them around the pool!
Nature and the physical world
You’re bound to find somewhere to park your sunlounger on Cox’s Bazar. The stretch of sand in Bangladesh is the longest beach in the world at 241km (150miles)
If you think the world’s largest mammal migration is that of the wildebeest and zebras across the Mara, you would be wrong. The rainy season gathering of up to 10 million fruit bats in Zambia’s Kasanka National Park is the greatest migration of mammals anywhere on the planet.
Anna Creek Station in South Australia, at 24,244km2, (over six million acres) is the world’s largest working cattle station, making it larger than Wales and almost the size of Belgium.
People taking UK walking breaks with HF Holidays will cover a total of 842,482km (523,494 miles) in 2013 – a distance that would take them to the moon and back.
Got any more? Did we miss some? Email your travel facts to James or Trish and we’ll update them as they come in.
An ultra long-haul non-stop flight is a flight by a commercially operated airliner without any scheduled intermediate stop of any kind and a route length using the higher end of the airliners’ range. These flights usually follow a great circle route, often passing over polar regions. As of April 1, 2015, the longest non-stop scheduled airline flight is Qantas Flight 8 from Dallas-Fort Worth, USA, to Sydney, Australia, and return, flown with an Airbus A380-800.