If you've had the opportunity to go away on holiday over the summer, I hope you caught up on some rest & relaxation. I'll be going away for a few days at the beginning of September - so during August I've been flying (thankfully unaffected by the recent airport strikes) to Poland, Czech Republic and Cyprus finding some great new deals (which I'll tell you about later).

But I really want to tell you about our new Slovak Republican deal - The Crossroads - which we'll be launching on 30th August. What I've noticed is that very few people actually realise the huge growth potential of this small county ... in a word it's outstanding!

Few know just how fast and furious the Slovak Republic is developing. The country's economy is the second-fastest growing in Eastern Europe. And it yields a GDP just slightly behind Baltic Tiger, Latvia. And all this has taken place over a very short period of time.

I believe that the Slovak Republic is one of the best European examples of fast-growing wealth - the speed at which this economy has grown and prospered in the amount of time that it has is simply unbelievable!

The country's car manufacturing industry illustrates this ideally. Just 5 years ago, the Slovak Republic wasn't producing a single car. Since then, some giant manufacturers including Volkswagen, Hyundai and Peugeot-Citroen have come to town, and now yield a forecast production of 850,000 vehicles by 2008.

Sound impressive? Well, compare this production output against one of Europe's ?-manufacturers of cars - Italy - who manufacture around 1 million cars per annum.