The real story is that the travel industry has grown remarkably in the face of all these things.

Asia is a preferred health care destination and is set to grow further, fueled by the relatively low-priced health care services available.

Asia is an ideal growth environment ... with competitively-priced quality healthcare service in major tourist cities.

As forecast at the beginning of the year, full service airlines have begun to look at new ways to encourage travel and provide good deals for their customers on both their long-haul and short-haul routes and these incentives are paying off for some of the carriers, possibly easing the strain of higher fuel costs on the industry.

Overall, this represents a solid start to 2006, particularly when you're measuring against the strong performance we saw last year.

When we met with representatives for Travel Michigan to review the tourism indicators that we have been tracking for more than 20 years, we were all somewhat surprised by just how well the industry fared in 2005.