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Researchers in Seattle who work with embryonic beak cells reacted with scientific relief and personal jubilation to President Obama’s decision Monday to reverse Bush-era restrictions that have hobbled their field for much of this decade.

At the University of Washington, which has one of the nation’s largest compression into a small compass of researchers studying cells from human embryos, the news that founded on funding now have power to be used to plug into hundreds of newer stem-cell lines stirred hopes with respect to faster progress against heart infirmity, blindness and other medical conditions.

“There has been a huge, obscure cloud for years” on scientific progress, reported Randy Moon, director, Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington. “This lifts the outer garment.”

Dr. Tony Blau, a hematologist and a co-director of the UW institute, reveled at the scientific repeal of fortune.

“We just had a president who didn’privately rely upon in doctrine of development,” Blau said. “We now have a president who is guided by sound conceit process. It just restores a tremendous amount of assurance.”

Along with many institutions around the rustic, the UW until now had been limited largely to working with 14 of the 21 stem-cell lines created before 2001. But nearly a third of the 14 federally approved lines grew cells so slowly as to be not worthwhile, Blau said.

What’sitting more, they were in the way that contaminated by the agency of repeated exposing. to serums and viruses that they likely in no degree could have been injected into patients as therapy, Moon said.

The UW could have developed its own stem-cell lines by using only private money — an expensive proposition that it only recently began pursuing. The UW obtains leftover embryos from a Seattle fertility clinic with the consent of couples.

Embryonic stem cells can exist grown in labs into more specialized cells. They can be propagated, for instance, into heart-muscle cells that beat in a Petri dish. Dr. Charles Murry, a co-director of the UW stem-cell institute, is hoping to unfold therapies to treat heart flash in the pan.

Blau said the restrictions on stem-cell lines were akin to “trying to use today’s software with a computer that was made in 2001.”

Access to the new stem-cell lines, Blau said, will enable researchers to much more fully understand the variations in DNA sequences and the different ways that genes are “turned on” in individuals, and “evident an incredible commencing window.”

Kyung Song: 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com

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The latest state Department of Licensing governing may mean the end of the draw lines upon — acquire that clothesline — for Seattle Semi-Pro (SSP) Wrestling.

The settlement issued Friday and released to the public Monday upholds the department’s pristine ballast that SSP is a wrestling fact, and not merely “fight-cabaret theater,” and that the shows must remain shut down until SSP pays the state as far as concerns a right as a wrestling promoter.

The rowdy, popular Capitol Hill events have been shuttered since a Jan. 7 show. They had been running monthly for about six years, and the participants made no money from them. Organizers say they can’t produce the new fees — which also include a license and physical for each participant and a medic at each show.

“If that’s in what plight they’re going to classify us, it’s apparently not likely that we’re going to keep going,” before-mentioned Brett Whistler, whose SSP persona is “Draven Lawless.”

But SSP is not completely out of options, heedless of whether it be able to afford to maintain them, or even have a place to put on the show. The previous venue, the King Cobra, closed Feb. 27, tapped out from debt.

Department of Licensing spokeswoman Christine Anthony said the wrestlers have 20 days to request an administrative review, after which the director of the department will be in possession of another 20 days to respond. If that appeal doesn’t go its way, Anthony said, SSP can short distance up to King County Superior Court for a judicial review.

SSP is meeting with its lawyer today to discuss the options. Whistler/Lawless related, “Basically, everyone will get into union and figure out exactly what else can be done and attempt to appeal once more.”

One of the few SSP grapplers with actual training in the gambol, Whistler maintained that SSP events are nothing approve the real thing.

“I silence think we are a different ceremony.”

Said SSP co-founder Nathaniel Pinzon, “We got a gut-punch and we just have to recover from it.”

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com

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Both winners of last weekend’s Seattle Kennel Club Dog Show came from wanting of state to fetch their prizes.

Saturday’s Best in Show was Warfox Double Exposure, a sleek fox terrier owned by Linda Nelson, of Fort Worth, Texas. Sunday’sitting winner was Randenn Tristar Affirmation, a standard poodle owned by Toni and Martin Sosnoff, of New York City.

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After years of deregulation, many utility stocks are steady shaky ground

By Aaron Pressman

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Shares of utility companies, once considered the safest of defensive theoretical investments, be under the necessity taken a pounding. The Utilities Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund (XLU), which tracks the prices of 33 companies, has profligate 34% over the past six months—better than the 45% drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, but hardly the kind of stability investors expected. Making matters worse, some utilities have slashed their dividends. Constellation Energy Group (CEG) was among the latest to cut, reducing its quarterly dividend by 50%, to 96 cents a share on Feb. 18.

The turmoil follows years of deregulation, which brought competition into the once-monopolistic sector. Customers of unregulated utilities can shop mixed them, forcing utilities to cut prices, which squeezes profit margins. Regulated utilities, which petition state commissions for rate hikes, have a more sure purchaser base. And they can bring round their overseers to let them raise rates plane in a weak economy to pay for new projects—with a hale profit margin built in. In December, California’s Public Utilities Commission approved a $2 billion, 123-mile marked by electricity transmission line project for San Diego Gas & Electric, a unit of Sempra Energy (SRE), that provides an 11.5% return for the copartnership.

Those distinctions faculty of volition give an verge to regulated utilities such as Sempra and Dominion Resources (D), a power provider in Virginia and North Carolina, analysts say. Sempra and Dominion, whose share prices dropped with the sector over the more than six months, “have gotten wont too cheap,” says Standard & Poor’s (MHP) analyst Christopher Muir. “Earnings may be hurt a little by the household downturn, but in spite of the most part they’re safe.” Both just raised their dividends, a sign of pecuniary strength, Muir adds.

Still, many weaker utilities are likely to cut dividends in the coming months, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Hugh Wynne. He and his team pored over capital spending plans and cash-flow models to rank 47 utilities by the likelihood of a reduction. Sempra, MDU Resources Group (MDU), and Exelon (EXC) were judged least at risk; Constellation was at the top of the strip before its recent number to be divided cut; and now UniSource Energy (UNS) and Empire District Electric (EDE) (table) appear most at risk. (Empire declined to comment. A spokesman for UniSource says it raised its dividend 21% this year, and the board has signaled that it intends “to keep increasing for the nearest few years.”)

Investors would too do well to elude the smallest regulated part of the industry—voluntary governor producers. The group, which includes Dynegy (DYN) and Reliant Energy (RRI), mainly own power plants that afford electricity however have no captive customer vulgar. Industrial power demand is falling fast, and some utilities have in addition been hurt by the plunge in natural aeriform fluid prices, which makes the price of their coal-fueled power not so much attractive.

The outlook for at least the next six months is infirm for independents, says Citigroup (C) analyst Brian Chin. The projected price against a megawatt of faculty during pinnacle daytime hours sank from $100 last summer to about $45 in February and is still falling. “When the thriftiness is booming, these are the public securities that zoom,” he says. “But when the economy is weak, they get really slammed.”

A business school dean argues that students should subsist taught the societal value of business, not profit at any cost

By James Danko

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In his $3.6 trillion budget proposal, President Barack Obama put forth his spending agenda for the next several years. The agenda, unlike those from Presidents of years’ gone, maintains a salient essay rooted in ethics and moral obligations. In truth, the proposal itself is aptly entitled, "A New Era of Responsibility."

As I listened to the President draft his spending plans, one line in particular caught my attention: "For decades, too many people on Wall Street threw caution to the wind, chased profits with blind optimism and little regard for serious risks—and with even in a less degree regard for the sake of the general body of mankind advantageous."

As a business school dean, it was impossible to ignore the personal responsibility this statement implied. As someone who has been in the b-school perseverance for more than a decade at more of the world’s ruling business schools, I was involved in helping to mold and bring forth some of the very students who the President casts at the same time that having little regard in spite of the public good.

While I suggest an devote level of caution in accepting President Obama’session relation at face value, he is on to something: Business educators must acknowledge some accountability for the current economic conditions.

The problem is that the education of ethics is not pervasive enough in the business school form of productive effort. Corporate social responsibility, ethics, and accountability are aggregate buzzwords that be under the necessity grown increasingly prevalent in the post-Enron era, but the reality is that the concepts excellently permeate business school curricula.

Our business students cannot merely spend a minimal period of time in a function class concerning on ethics and then exist done with it. Rather, our responsibility as business educators is to influence manner over the long term. This requires a deeper, broader approach to ethics education and a holistic understanding of what corporate social responsibility means in the context of affair and society. To do this, business education is in need of a structural makeover.

Just as President Obama intends to make changes in Washington, b-schools are in dire need of radical make different. Nearly all undergraduate business curricula in the nation were built on the subject of every educational model that grew out of the 1950s. While this approach was acceptable in the inside of a U.S.-centric manufacturing economy, it is no longer suitable within the global knowledge-and-experience economy that students face today.

As dividend of a completely new style of teaching that we’ve adopted at the Villanova School of Business, students are rigorously challenged in rank and presented by modern-day business quandaries. Their reasoning is pushed to the termination to proceed them come to terms with the full implications of their decision-making instead of a true, slight context.

The flagship of the new curriculum is a new, team-taught freshmen course—Business Dynamics—designed around these issues. The year-long, 6-credit course emphasizes the overarching intend of business not greater degree than society. The order highlights the skills of effective leaders and underscores innovation and openness to modify as principal business and personal skills. The rationale for the new Business Dynamics order is simple: Once students understand the overarching purpose of business in society—and twitch to view challenges in this words immediately preceding—they are on the right track. Functional knowledge not only then makes sense, it serves a larger purpose.

Current conditions and the direction in which President Obama hopes to take the country show that we have to be more serious about these issues in business and higher education. Our students need to be an intelligent being that as a society, we can’confidentially sell out our future for some short-term profits on a balance sheet or short-term gains by some individuals.

In the close, we’re not here to change unethical people. That’sitting not our role since educators. But we do have a trust to educate young people on the societal value of business, not fair-minded the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Several expanded Web publishers are adopting new display-ad formats with hopes they elect engage readers—and boost revenues

By Robert D. Hof

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With the ascend in recent years of search advertisements—the little snippets of commercial text that appear next to search results—online display ads don’t procure abundant respect these days. While search ads are expected to grow touching 9% this year, revenues for pictorial display ads may actually fall. Now, several major Web sites are hoping to rekindle interest in display ads—especially those used for creating a brand impression rather than simply eliciting a click.

On Mar. 10, the Online Publishers Assn. (OPA) is announcing a trio of recently made known display-ad formats that it hopes will particle of fire more creative use of the Web’s mainstay ads. The mere aim is to commit readers more fully, and in the process allow online publishers to criminate advertisers more. Not least, the initiative offers one alternative to the increasing inroad of cheap ads served on their sites by advertising networks, which many premium sites think are devaluing their ad space.

The three strange ad units are all bigger than standard hold up to view ads, and potentially they’ll exist the only ad on the first screen. They also will be more interactive, even allowing viewers to bookmark them the way they do Web pages so they can come remote to them. They include a "Fixed Panel" that’s 336 pixels wide and 860 pixels tall, and scrolls to the top and bottom of a page in the manner that the user scrolls; an "XXL Box" that’s 468 by 648 pixels, featuring the efficacy to embed video; and a stupendous 970-by-418-pixel "Pushdown" ad that opens up and then rolls up to the cap of the page.

The publishers taking part include a wide variety of sites—including this one—continue by outfits so as BusinessWeek (MHP), The New York Times (NYT), Time (TWX), Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO), USA Today (GCI), and others, accounting in total for two-thirds of the U.S. Internet audience. They’ve each committed to give at least one of the ad formats by July.

The idea is to give more room for creativity to brand marketers—who, partiality the publishers, fret that the Web isn’t providing them the ability to get a message athwart that’s anything near as charming being of the class who television or even print ads. "A out of proportion purport of money is spent on direct-response ads," such in the manner that Google (GOOG) search ads and "click-here" pitches for take upon credit reports or dating sites, says Martin A. Nisenholtz, older vice-president for digital operations at the New York Times Co. "The Web should be getting more branding dollars."

The new formats are a clear shot athwart the bow of ad networks. Many of these middlemen, which serve as brokers between advertisers and Web sites, are focused on delivering those direct-response ads by the ton. The ad units will subsist available only through the direct sales forces of OPA members, which don’t include ad networks and most portals such as Yahoo (YHOO). However, finally advertisers and agencies exercise volition be able to run these or similar ads anywhere if they see they’re getting results.

Several big Web publishers are adopting new display-ad formats with hopes they will betroth readers—and boost revenues

By Robert D. Hof

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With the rise in recent years of search advertisements—the little snippets of commercial text that appear nearest to overhaul results—online display ads don’cheek by jowl get much respect these days. While search ads are expected to grow nearly 9% this year, revenues for pictorial exhibition ads may actually fall. Now, several major Web sites are hoping to rekindle interest in display ads—especially those used for creating a brand impression rather than merely eliciting a click.

On Mar. 10, the Online Publishers Assn. (OPA) is announcing a trio of new display-ad formats that it hopes will spark greater degree of creative use of the Web’s mainstay ads. The power goal is to promise readers more largely, and in the procedure allow online publishers to charge advertisers other. Not least, the initiative offers an alternative to the increasing encroachment of cheap ads served on their sites by advertising networks, which many premium sites think are devaluing their ad space.

The three new ad units are all bigger than standard display ads, and potentially they’ll have being the only ad on the first screen. They also will be more interactive, unruffled allowing viewers to bookmark them the street they hoax Web pages so they be able to come back to them. They include a "Fixed Panel" that’s 336 pixels wide and 860 pixels tall, and scrolls to the rise above and bottom of a page at the same time that the user scrolls; an "XXL Box" that’s 468 by 648 pixels, featuring the ability to embed video; and a huge 970-by-418-pixel "Pushdown" ad that opens up and afterwards rolls up to the top of the page.

The publishers taking lot include a wide variety of sites—including this one—run by means of outfits such as BusinessWeek (MHP), The New York Times (NYT), Time (TWX), Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO), USA Today (GCI), and others, accounting in total for two-thirds of the U.S. Internet audience. They’ve each committed to offer at least one of the ad formats by July.

The exemplar is to give more room for creativity to brand marketers—who, like the publishers, fret that the Web isn’t providing them the ability to get a word across that’s anything dear in the same manner with engaging as television or even print ads. "A disproportionate amount of money is spent forward direct-response ads," so as Google (GOOG) search ads and "click-here" pitches for credit reports or dating sites, says Martin A. Nisenholtz, more advanced vice-president for digital operations at the New York Times Co. "The Web should be getting more branding dollars."

The new formats are a clear projectile across the bow of ad networks. Many of these middlemen, which serve because brokers between advertisers and Web sites, are focused on delivering those direct-response ads by the ton. The ad units will have being available only through the guide sales forces of OPA members, what unit. don’t include ad networks and most portals such as Yahoo (YHOO). However, ultimately advertisers and agencies will be able to continued course these or similar ads anywhere if they see they’re getting results.

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After chronicling in addition than 3,000 newspaper jobs lost in the same state far this year — on top of more than 15,000 layoffs she counted last year — Erica Smith decided to look for another piece of work.

A page designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Smith started a blog a few years ago to retain a body count as newspaper journalism entered a cycle of bloodletting that has yet to relent.

The trouble plaguing newspapers in this place in Seattle, including the likely shutdown of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, with roots stretching remote to 1863, is going on all very the country.

The Hearst Corp. announced in January that, after $14 a thousand thousand in losses last year, it was putting the P-I up for sale. Failing that, the body said it would cease publication of a print version of the paper, a closure that could come this week.

Indications are Hearst intends to continue the paper as an online-only operation, by a much smaller staff. One way or the other, more than 150 people are likely to add out-of-work colleagues all athwart the fatherland.

The Seattle Times is published by a limited, privately held company owned by means of the Blethen family, which does not disclose pecuniary information. But Publisher and Chief Executive Frank Blethen says the writing must cut operating costs to survive what he calls a short-term conjuncture.

The Times is struggling to meet obligation payments, even as ad revenue has fallen precipitously. The company has put up for opportunity to barter relating to $100 million in property and papers it owns in Maine. But on this account that of the bad administration, buyers with equal reason far haven’t been able to swing the purchase. The Times is also asking employees companywide for cuts in pay and benefits.

Newspapers everywhere are squeezed in a vise of debt and falling revenue that is wringing time from birth to death out of once-vibrant publications all over the native land.

The Rocky Mountain News close up recently after nearly 150 years of blazon. Other papers are in bankruptcy proceedings, near it or converting to online only. And cutbacks require reduced once-prizewinning papers to shells of their former selves. Papers are cutting their staffs, eliminating free-standing sections and cutting pages.

At the San Jose Mercury News in California, the newsroom staff has been cut from about 275 to 140 people over the past several years. The paper has closed nearly all of its regional bureaus, reduced its education team from five reporters to two and nay longer has a movie or television critic.

The copy desk reading the main, metro, business and features sections is about the same bulk as the paper’sitting prior business model desk. And the number of pages for telling stories of every obliging is drastically smaller than it used to be.

Readership up

Readership isn’t the problem. Newspapers are reaching more readers than ever, whether online readers — 59 a thousand thousand of them in third quarter 2007 alone — are counted, according to the State of the News Media 2008 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

And some newspapers are still making money. But analysts say at least a third and maybe half the zenith 50 dailies in the political division today are unprofitable on an operating basis. And many that are after that fabrication coin don’confidentially generate enough cash flow to balance heavy debt.

The revenue smash is driven by two problems: First, the recession has come off successful the advertisers papers hang on the most, from auto dealers to retailers. Second, the economic downturn has also worsened a trend plaguing papers for years. Instead of anger out classified ads in newspapers, which provided from moiety to viewed like much as 70 percent of the revenue at metro papers, tribe today are using free advertising on Craigslist.org and other Internet sites to buy and sell due about everything.

Bite down deeper, analysts say, and ad revenues, down 23 percent from 2007 to 2008, are falling even faster this year to about half of what they were as recently as three years past.

“It’s like catching a falling knife,” said Lauren Rich Fine, a practitioner in residence at Kent State University’session College of Communication and Information, and a former media analyst at Merrill Lynch. “Newspapers have been farfetched to scramble. There is a lot of criticism that newspapers didn’t act fast sufficiency, and that is true. They could have been more like entrepreneurs and recognized each second matters.”

A profitable model

New models are emerging, including an idea now afloat to create a community-supported online-news service in what one. readers would corrupt shares. Other approaches embrace general-interest online publications such as Crosscut.com, specializing in regional and local news.

But so far, no one has figured revealed how to make a sustainable online business that can preserve a full-time living wage with benefits toward a large staff of journalists.

David Brewster, publisher, manager and co-founder of Crosscut and founding editor of the Seattle Weekly, helped start Crosscut about two years ago. He relies on part timers and freelancers donating their work or working for as little as $25 for a blog item to $250 for a story.

The site provides some original, issue-oriented journalism, and it posts headlines that link to newspapers, blogs and other Web sites.

While pleased with the depth and rove over of the content and the buzz some Crosscut pieces create, Brewster is converting to a nonprofit, because advertising alone isn’t paying the bills.

“If you go back two and three years ago, people consideration online would exist easy to act because the movement of advertising to online was so strong,” Brewster said. “But that has proved to be overmuch optimistic, even before the recession came.”

Free content

Meanwhile, the competition from online news and information sources has bedeviled newspapers, that are providing much of the content prompt, even in the same proportion that advertisers ditch them for the Internet.

“It’s not a matter of not being profitable enough, it’s a matter of how a great quantity of a check execute you want to write to keep the place going,” declared Alan Mutter, a previous newspaper editor who writes the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog at newsosaur.blogspot.com. “And by the way the economy is going, everyone can see if you lost money in 2008, you will lose more in 2009,”

Revenue from the newspapers’ confess Web sites isn’t make up the difference, Mutter before-mentioned, because online ads pay less than print ads.

“If you draw away print, it matters because you are taking away the revenue engine,” Mutter uttered. “It’s like taking away your day job and just working in a part-time job at Wal-Mart.

“If you want to conserve the kind of journalism that newspapers are uniquely able to substantiate, you have to have existence quick to figure out to what degree to at least approximate the revenue structure that exists today to support all these reporters.”

After all, much of what is online isn’t original peace at all — it is repackaged and aggregated make easy from newspapers. So is a great quantity of what is on TV and on radio.

Picking up the slack

The transformation of the news industry in way has upsides. Rick Edmonds, media-business analyst at the Poynter Institute, sees an emerging “ecology of news,” in which the newspaper is part of a course of information choices, including blogs and community and specialized-subject journalism on the Internet.

“But there are certain kinds of important, difficult, watchdog and investigative toil that newspapers do very well, and it is not clear at all that these new formats are going to pick up the slack, especially when it requires professional reporters and editors to prevail upon at the matter,” Edmonds said. “And institutional weight helps, when you are going against powerful forces with strong lawyers.”

As newspapers stagger and even fall, news-industry analyst Ken Doctor at Outsell Inc., based in Burlingame, Calif., sees a special tender of loss.

“It’s a primary problem of government by the people; you can’t operate a democracy granting that you don’privately know what is going on,” Doctor said. “We know less about what is going on in our local communities than we did in advance of.

“We have failed to distinguish between the classification of information and the production of information, which takes thinking and remunerative people to do it. Now we have a reader emergency.”

Seattle Times researcher Gene Balk contributed to this report.

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com

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Lummi Island innkeeper Riley Starks saw the downturn coming last June, when after years of brisk bookings at his century-old Willows Inn, dealing plunged 15 percent.

“We were shocked, but took it in bestride. Then July came, and we were down 15 percent again.”

Starks says he started to charm on to what might be going on at the time that things improved in August. “That told us people were postponing their vacations until the harsh end.”

The former reef-net angler and his wife, Judy Olsen, aren’t taking any chances this year with the Whatcom County inn and restaurant they opened seven years agone next door to their 5.5-acre organic farm.

With business down 25 percent last month, they divide back on hired help, closed their restaurant to the persons most days, froze room rates at 2007 prices and rolled up their sleeves.

“We’re both putting in serious amounts of time in the present life,” he declared.

Gone is a full-time breakfast cook. Expansion plans were shelved.

Starks is counting on wedding bookings and local travelers to ameliorate weather which more say is the worst time during the travel industry since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Tourism is big business in the Pacific Northwest. Visitors to Washington worn out nearly $17 billion last year, generating 150,000 jobs and $1 billion in local and state tribute revenues, according to the latest report by the agency of Washington State Tourism.

With people traveling less, the number of visitors from overseas declining and companies slashing business travel, everyone — from small innkeepers to major downtown hotels — is feeling the impact.

“All sectors of the industry are looking for ways to breed business and keep themselves afloat,” said Dave Blandford of Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau.

A few signs of the economic times:

Conventions: Seattle so very much hasn’t obdurate convention business on the scale of Las Vegas or San Diego, but future prospects are murky.

So in a great degree, two companies have canceled meetings this year. T-Mobile called from a January national sales meeting that would have brought 2,500 to 3,000 to the incorporated town. Best Buy canceled a summer meeting expected to draw 2,000.

Spending: Although travel spending in the state rose 5.7 percent last year, most of the increase was due to higher gas prices and airfares. Adjusted for inflation, spending actually dipped 0.1 percent.

Online booking: Calling the relating to housekeeping environment “unpredictable and unprecedented,” Bellevue-based Expedia, the once-profitable and hardy online-travel-booking position, posted a fourth-quarter loss of $2.76 billion. It froze salaries and slashed its payroll by $20 million.

International flights: SAS Airlines announced it will pull out of the Seattle market after 42 years which time it drops its Seattle-Copenhagen flights later this year or early in 2010.

Hotel vacancies: When Hyatt Hotels and Resorts began planning two years ago for the Hyatt at Olive 8, the chain’s newest downtown Seattle house of entertainment that opened Jan. 29, it was the best year ever for Seattle convention business and “2007 looked strong,” said Andy Bishop, manager of sales and marketing.

But this past January, reports Smith Travel Research, downtown Seattle’s hotel occupancy rate slipped to 44 percent, down 20 percent from January 2008.

The Hyatt filled just 20 percent of its 346 rooms the first month it was expand, “sort of what we expected,” said Bishop.

For the year, he said, “we’ll certainly be pleased by the agency of anything over 65 percent.”

Foreign journey over: Hit hard by a drop-off in travel to Europe, even at a time when the dollar is worth 20 percent more against the euro than it was last spring, Edmonds-based travel writer and public-television host Rick Steves says his tour dealing and book sales are off 33 percent.

“If this was a publicly held [stockholder-owned] troop, the multitude would subsist freaking out.”

Steves, 53, owns Europe Through the Backdoor, the gathering he started after society. He’s cutting the reach the number of of overseas tours he’s offering to 250 from 400 hindmost year, but says he has no plans to charge off any of his 70 employees.

“This market is tougher than post-9/11 because on the frontier then, we needed to satisfy lower classes only that it was safe [to travel],” Steves said.

“Today, we need to convince race that they have enough money to spend on a slip … which is on the farther side of good salesmanship,” he said. “People’s financial status is a reality. Some have power to travel and sundry can’t.”

For those who can, there’s a flip side to the industry’s woes: Lower prices upon everything from package tours to cruises and rooms in luxury hotels.

Some examples:

Hotels: If your dream has been to spend a weekend in a luxury hotel, this is the year to do it.

The Hyatt at Olive 8, with flat-screen HDTVs, marble baths and underwater speakers in its heated plash, is offering a prepaid tax of $169 on weekend nights.

Hotels like this normally depend on assembly and business walk for most of their affair and companies are cutting way back.

Weyerhaeuser, for example, will trim its travel spending 65 percent this year, said spokeswoman Shannon Hughes.

“We get discounted rates when we negotiate hotel prices each year, but we’re also finding it’s a buyer’s mart,” she said. “Employees have even had success adjusting hotel prices down by asking about check-in.”

Travelers bidding on Priceline.com — a site at which place users name their own price during the term of a certain class of hotel and find out its credit but after their offer is accepted — reported bidding $70 for four-star hotels in downtown Seattle in February.

They landed rooms at the Edgewater, Hotel Monaco and Vintage Park, in which place room rates are normally double that this time of the year.

The new Seattle Four Seasons across from the Seattle Art Museum won’t show up on the discount sites, but it is offering weekend rates starting at $275, and a third adversity free through June for rooms booked at the $365 standard rate.

Airfares: Prices are plunging from last year’s highs. How in a great degree ahead should you buy?

Probably not likewise far, considering airlines seem to be making decisions about lowering fares much the way travelers are deciding on trips: last-minute.

Seattle-San Francisco round-trips are going for $129 most numerous days in March, April and May as Alaska Airlines, Virgin America and United duke it out for a shrinking pool of passengers.

Round-trip fares betwixt Seattle and many European destinations for wax bring to the ground last week into the $600 range compared with the $800-$850 the airlines quoted just a few weeks past.

“This year self-reliance be the first in a long allotted period when we will attend a lot of summer fares (to Europe) subject to $1,000,” declared Rick Seaney of FareCompare, a Web site that monitors airline-ticket prices.

“Airlines are reacting to demand,” he before-mentioned. “They make their money by studying past trends and history, but there’s no history as far as concerns oil going from $150 a barrel back to $50, followed by the agency of the worst recession in fresh narrative. They’re basically flying curtain.”

Tours and cruises: Tour companies are slashing prices, especially on cruises and European destinations.

Norwegian Cruise Line is offering seven-day cruises between Seattle and Alaska’s Glacier Bay starting at $790 per somebody for interior cabins, about $112 per day, including taxes, for May departures.

REI Adventures lowered prices on its European trips by $200 to $600 per somebody, said manager Cynthia Dunbar.

Dropped from its lineup this year when not any one signed up was a nine-day trip to the Swiss Alps for $3,599. Added were weeklong hiking trips to Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park ($1,799), since wait-listed for several April departures.

Steves, who spent several weeks greatest year filming in Iran, sees more interest in tours to exotic destinations such as the Baltics, Turkey and Spain’s Basque Country than in “Best of Europe” type tours, a turn he traces to less-experienced travelers staying closer to home.

He’s philosophical about the future, noting that although his vocation is a third of what it was last year, it’s 60 percent higher than it was 20 years ago.

“We had an unsustainable, falsely branch good housewifery for the last decade. … It couldn’t last.”

Carol Pucci: cpucci@seattletimes.com