But in the industry people are beginning to ask: will they continue to do so?As

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But in the industry, people are beginning to ask: will they continue to do so?As travellers have become more sophisticated, so the desire for independence has spread downwards through the market. These days, it seems that more and more people want individually tailored holidays, and they are increasingly able to assemble their own holiday ingredients via the internet. Americans spent almost $8bn (£5bn) on travel online this year, making it by far the most valuable form of e-commerce (computer prducts came a distant second). In fact, almost 50 per cent of all online spending was travel-related. "We see travel being one of the major growth areas in online retail," says Chris Savage, head of External Communications at the internet consultants Forrester UK, who recently used the Net to plan a whistle-stop vacation trip to three US cities, logging on to local community sites to check out the neighbourhoods where hotels were located to see which were the nicest, the safest, and which had the best amenities.Savage foresees a near-future in which internet-adapted mobile-phones will enable people to move spontaneously from one holiday-spot to another, picking up instant bargains from sites like lastminute. You could set off for a fortnight's vacation with just the first weekend booked, and take it from there.And if you can do that, why worry about the World According to Thomson? Why bother with the package-tour universe in which, as the Pythons put it, "Your plane is still in Iceland waiting to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can pick you up on the tarmac at 3am in the bloody morning because of 'unforeseen difficulties' - ie the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and when you finally get to the hotel there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet."Well, when you put it like that, the Germans are welcome to it.. House builders are ruining the landscape with "little boxes" with little architectural merit or local character, the Housing minister, Nick Raynsford, said yesterday.

House builders are ruining the landscape with "little boxes" with little architectural merit or local character, the Housing minister, Nick Raynsford, said yesterday. Launching an urban design guide aimed at tackling bad planning, Mr Raynsford also attacked builders for continuing to make houses with big gardens in rural areas.The minister said there was to be no government "blueprint" for good design, but new developments should fit in with their surroundings and local people should be consulted.The new guide, By Design, said one example of good design was the revamped Peace Gardens in Sheffield, which provided a safe, traffic-free haven for visitors and residents. Another was Hulme, in Manchester, where monumental concrete council blocks were torn down and replaced with traditional streets and community facilities.But Mr Raynsford said some developers were still ignoring good design, particularly on housing estates. "We have seen some very poor-quality private developments - little boxes put together with no sense of feel for the area. These are equally a cause of shame and disappointment," he said.He also confessed to a "horror" of 1960s and 1970s estates such as the Aylesbury in Southwark, south London, where Tony Blair made his first speech on the inner cities as Prime Minister, and the nearby Heygate estate. Both are the subject of regeneration programmes.He said local authorities should be able to point to the guide when they turned down a planning application on the grounds of bad design.Brian Raggett, chairman of the Urban Design Alliance, also speaking at the launch, said some cities had been marred by inner ring roads such as Birmingham's, which was being redesigned to improve pedestrian access."We are recognising there is a need to repair some of the damage of the Sixties and Seventies," he said.A spokesman for the House Builders' Federation said the "little boxes" Mr Raynsford described were built because people wanted to buy them."People evidently want to live in them because, obviously, people are purchasing them," the spokesman said.

"That is not to say we can't improve the quality of the design.". A woman train driver, whose dismissal sparked a chain of industrial action after she claimed she was sacked for her union activities, accepted a £16,000 payment yesterday in settlement of her case. A woman train driver, whose dismissal sparked a chain of industrial action after she claimed she was sacked for her union activities, accepted a £16,000 payment yesterday in settlement of her case. But Sarah Friday, 35, will not be reinstated by South West Trains after an employment tribunal ruled that she was 66 per cent responsible for her dismissal. The tribunal in Croydon, south London, dismissed her claim of discrimination and victimisation but decided she had been unfairly dismissed.A company spokeswomansaid: "We always said we would respect the decision of the tribunal and we believe that £16,000 is a small price to pay to bring this episode to an end."A spokesman for the Rail, Maritime and Transport union said: "We are disappointed that Sarah Friday has not been reinstated but the settlement is a victory for her and for the union and will make South West Trains think twice in their dealings with employees in the future."The dispute over the sacking of Ms Friday, from Gravesend, Kent, led to a series of strikes on Waterloo services earlier this year.