Upgrade to an ocean view cabin for an additional 295 per person or grab one with your own private balcony for an extra 395.

Alternatively, if you'd rather wait until April to take to the high seas then 1,399 will get you what the tour operator calls "a 13 day exotic southern Caribbean cruise" where you will wake up to a new destination every day . . . Aruba, Venezuela, Barbados, St Kitts, Antigua, St Lucia, to name a few. For all the details on these holidays contact Tour America at www. touramerica. ie, 01 8173500.

Great gift ideas with hotels offering vouchers It's voucher time of year again and a number of hotels are suggesting these as the perfect solution to all those Christmas gift dilemmas. The Mount Juliet Conrad hotel in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, for example, has vouchers available online and allows you to choose a straightforward monetary amount or to opt for a specific gift. So, if your beloved is of a golfing bent, you could decide to go for a nine-hole lesson with the resident pro for 130 or a round of golf on the championship course for 105.

On the spa side of things there's Dead Sea Discovery treatment for 70 or a full-day of revitalise treatments for 185. Other options include mid-winter getaway breaks or, for the foodies in your life, a voucher for dinner for two, with champagne on arrival, for 175. Log on to www. mountjuliet. com for these and other options.

Meanwhile Jury's Doyle are also suggesting the voucher idea, with all kinds of options available across the different hotel locations from a city weekend to dinner for two to afternoon tea. Vouchers can be delivered anywhere in the world and are valid for Jury's Doyle hotels in Ireland, the UK and the US. Ring 01 6070000 for more information.

Design Hotels scoop some great awards Design Hotels garnered a number of awards for themselves at the recent European Hotel Design Awards, winning five awards across eight categories, including the overall Hotel Design of the Year accolade for the Hospes Palacio de los Patos in Granada in Spain's Andalucia. The same hotel scooped the award for Best Hotel Architecture for the conversion of an existing building and other Design Hotels winners included Loisium Wine and Spa Resort hotel in Langenlois in Austria, and the duoMo hotel in Rimini, Italy. The awards were open to hotels that had opened between June 2005 and June 2006.

The travel editor's final farewell. . .

This is my last Globetrotter column for the Sunday Tribune and my final week as Travel Editor here, overseeing what has been one of the most enjoyable of the many editor positions that I have held with this newspaper over many years. I'm moving on to pastures new, but would like to thank all of you . . . the readers . . . for all of your input, suggestions, feedback and general enthusiasm for the travel pages over the past few years. The world is now smaller and more accessible than was once the case . . . I'm just back from the Seychelles, a wonderful island-idyll of a country in the Indian Ocean (see page 30), in a few days' time I'll be in Venice (my favourite place in the world as regular readers will know) celebrating a 'special' birthday in the company of my equally travel-addicted husband and then, when 2007 finally dawns, I hope to be in Egypt, basking in the ancient glories of that timeless land. So for now, with planes and boats and trains still beckoning aplenty, it's over and out. . . .