Your problems are solved if you live by the sea and have a row with your wife: Travelodge is to spend £150m opening 55 new hotels in British coastal towns by 2015. The first locations - Blackpool, Weymouth, Newquay, Bournemouth and Scarborough - will be opening in the next 12 months. The firm is already predicting 30% sales increase in its 30 coastal properties in July and August this year as more Britons holiday in the UK. Holiday camp Pontins has also said sales are up 10% on last year, as more people feel the pinch from rising fuel costs on their airline tickets. Travelodge is still pressing ahead though with its plans to open 100 hotels in Spain partly to appeal to Spanish customers, but also to cater to British travelers with no imagination.

It transpires that The German Bundesliga isn’t just the nickname of a working girl I met in Hamburg last weekend, but a low German football league. It’s become an interesting barometer of modern times as hordes of our own Premier League fans have got so fed up with paying a large fortune for a season ticket to UK games, they find it cheaper to travel to the land of sausage and pay as little as £6 for a match (as opposed to £102 for Chelsea). Fans report being able to get return flights, a hotel room, and a ticket for as little as £65. The experience has been likened to the glory days of 1970s – you stand on terraces, pass round gaspers and get your pint glass filled up for £1. Similar enthusiasm is shown for the Spanish La Liga. The new season starts in August and if I wasn’t so busy waiting for this rash to clear up, I’d think about setting up an online travel business that sorts out coaches, tickets, hotels and bail money for the disgruntled UK fans…any takers?!

Wind farms are a good idea, but are often seen as oppressive and unsightly. That’s why the go-ahead has been given to build Europe’s biggest onshore wind farm in Scotland – the hills of South Lanarkshire to be precise, straddling the Glasgow-Carlisle motorway. The farm will be capable of powering 320,000 homes (doesn’t seem much does it?!) with 152-turbines. As well as making Scotland a contender for the Green capital of Europe, the project will bring £600m in investment and create over 200 jobs during construction, which Scottish and Southern Energy said would start in 2010 and end in 2011. The   infrastructure necessary to transmit the energy from the farm has already been upgraded with an £84m investment from ScottishPower.  The announcement came on the day that Malcolm Wicks, the British Energy Minister, declared that expansion in offshore wind power in the North Sea could generate 30,000 jobs and attract £3 billion in investment.

The minimum wage in the UK is £5.52 an hour. Sad then that reports have been coming in of sizable names in the restaurant business paying out far less than that in the hope that tips from customers will make up the difference. Staff at the Hard Rock Café in central London are getting just £2.06 an hour; at Carluccio’s its £3.75. But the “winner” is D&D London, half owned by Sir Terence Conran and with revenues of £71m: The Independent has found their staff taking home a rubbish £1.88 an hour. Hard Rock were keen to point out that staff keep 100% of cash or credit card tips, often raising their take home to between £8 and £12 per hour. But that’s not always the case; the union Unite has launched a campaign to stop companies retaining staff tips and The Department for Business is reviewing the rules which allow restaurants to include tips in the calculations for the minimum wage.