Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - HBO is developing a biopic of former beauty queen, singer and celebrity pitchwoman Anita Bryant, who is known mostly for her work as an anti-gay activist.

Airlines offer hotel rooms, gadgets, dining certificates as way to spend reward miles. Airlines have been tinkering with their frequent flier programs to spur loyalty. Increasingly they're giving customers the option to buy more than plane tickets with their rewards, and that may offer more bang for your buck.

Beirut, one-time pearl of the Orient, is reclaiming its lustre, wooing some of the world's top luxury hotels to set up shop after a record year for tourism - and peace - in city once synonymous with danger.

Hersha Hospitality to add 4 hotels to list of properties. Hersha Hospitality Management said it will add four hotels to the properties it operates during the first half of 2010.

LONDON (Reuters) - International hotel chain Holiday Inn is offering a trial human bed-warming service at three hotels in Britain this month.

Choice Hotels opening Haiti's first chain hotels in a decade. Choice Hotels is opening the first chain hotels to serve Haiti in almost a decade.

Travel briefs. Battleship Missouri open for visitors again in Pearl Harbor

Correction: Finnish train story. In a Jan. 4 story about a train accident, The Associated Press, relying on information from the Finnish Rail Administration and the Finnish Transport Agency, reported erroneously that the train hit the Holiday Inn Hotel in Helsinki. The train struck the offices of accountants Ernst & Young, located in the same building but separate from the hotel, the firm's spokeswoman Hannele Lindell said. The hotel was not damaged and continued to operate normally, Holiday Inn management said in a statement.

Cut costs without eroding your brand; Research firm lists decade's best and worst industries. PRICE WARS: Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Maybe, but businesses should think twice before they try to match the prices of their competitors.

Train crashes into hotel at main Helsinki railway station after brakes fail. Finnish transport officials say a near-empty passenger train has crashed into a hotel by Helsinki's main railway station, causing damage but no injuries.

EAST

Texas border mayor says he, Mexican officials he was with weren't targets in drive-by shooting. A Texas border mayor said Wednesday he doesn't think he or the Mexican officials he was with Tuesday were the targets of a drive-by shooting that killed a woman in front of a popular restaurant in Piedras Negras, Mexico.

Jersey Shore for holiday shoppers and other winter visitors: Not like the MTV show. It's not summertime and it's nothing like the MTV reality show.

Jobs, not the Taliban, are the main worry in remote Afghan town where Marines patrol streets. The dusty bazaar in this remote town in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province was once teeming with Taliban fighters and drug smugglers who used it as a central transit point in their journeys to and from nearby Pakistan.

Travel briefs. 10 ski resorts with diversions for the rest of us

Paz Kahana is exactly the type of voter that each of the four Democrats in the US Senate campaign is trying to woo. He has yet to decide whose box he'll check in tomorrow's primary. ``I just woke up to realize, `I have two days to decide,' '' Kahana, a Newton resident who runs a software company, said yesterday before listening to Attorney General Martha Coakley's stump speech at a school in Newton. He left impressed with her personality, disappointed she didn't deliver more specifics, and still undecided. In the final weekend before tomorrow's vote, the four Democrats, and the two GOP contenders for US Senate, fanned out across the state to rally supporters - and try to attract new ones. Coakley earned a key backer: former president Bill Clinton recorded a telephone message that will be blasted out today to 500,000 voters urging them to elect her. Alan Khazei was the only candidate to visit any churches, attending Charles Street AME Church in Dorchester in the morning and in the after

Paz Kahana is exactly the type of voter that each of the four Democrats in the US Senate campaign is trying to woo. He has yet to decide whose box he'll check in tomorrow's primary. ``I just woke up to realize, `I have two days to decide,' '' Kahana, a Newton resident who runs a software company, said yesterday before listening to Attorney General Martha Coakley's stump speech at a school in Newton. He left impressed with her personality, disappointed she didn't deliver more specifics, and still undecided. In the final weekend before tomorrow's vote, the four Democrats, and the two GOP contenders for US Senate, fanned out across the state to rally supporters - and try to attract new ones. Coakley earned a key backer: former president Bill Clinton recorded a telephone message that will be blasted out today to 500,000 voters urging them to elect her. Alan Khazei was the only candidate to visit any churches, attending Charles Street AME Church in Dorchester in the morning and in the after

When Greg McHale checks into his hotel room after a day of business travel, he expects what he calls the Òwonderful and bizarre,Ó namely complimentary Snickers bars, Diet Pepsi and, sometimes, a compact disc of his favorite electronic dance music.

Why do we dream of a white Christmas, and what are the chances we will have one?. Bing Crosby didn't have to dream of a white Christmas ? he could bank on it.

A hotel chain offered Tuesday to take some of the stress out of Christmas this year with a special room rate in Britain for mother-in-laws.