DATE: Sunday, June 1, 1997                  TAG: 9705300088

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E6   EDITION: FINAL 
COLUMN: TRAVELWISE

SOURCE: STEPHEN HARRIMAN

                                            LENGTH:   93 lines

RICK STEVES MARATHON WILL TEACH YOU TO TOUR EUROPE LIKE VETERAN

IF EUROPE is on your mind or in your travel plans, set aside June 21-22 for a 44-hour marathon of all 39 episodes of ``Travels in Europe'' with Rick Steves. The show is a fixture on PBS and appears twice a week on the Travel Channel, but this way you get the whole continent, from Rick's perspective, in one full-strength dose.

Before starting the Travels in Europe series in 1989, Steves mentally sliced Europe into 52 episodes (four 13-week seasons). If you're a follower, you might like to know that the final 13 of these are finally being filmed this summer.

Steves has found a special niche in the travel world. What he aims to give people, through his guidebooks and television series, is not just a list of things to see, but skills that will make them thinking, independent travelers who can find the right place - and right hotel - for themselves.

Steves' main message is that you can see Europe without a wad of travelers checks thick enough to choke a Lipizzaner stallion. In fact, spending less can allow you see more - if you do it right.

His books, TV shows and conversation are laced with such ``how-to'' tips on traveling in Europe plus, of course, recommendations on where to go, what to see and where to stay. But underlying it all is Steves' ``back-door'' travel philosophy - traveling in ways that will take visitors to the less touristy, less commercial places in Europe, turning them into temporary locals.

Steves' travel company also runs about 70 tours of Europe each year. I just missed him by a day at one of his wonderful out-of-the-way places, Hallstatt, Austria, then caught up with him and his group at a string quartet concert at the castle in Salzburg. The company offers trip planning and has a library/resource center for travelers.

Steves was bitten by the travel bug while a teen-ager when he went with his father, a piano importer, and his mother to Europe to look at pianos.

``I was 14 and I remember not wanting to go,'' said Steves. ``I didn't want to go somewhere where people didn't speak my language.

``Then I got there and realized this was really exciting. I saw other kids with backpacks in the Copenhagen train station, as free as birds. I vowed to go back to Europe. And now I've gone every year since I was 18.''

During the 1970s, Steves was one of the army of American college students who backpacked through Europe and Asia. For the first four or five trips, he traveled for fun on his breaks from the University of Washington. Then, after taking a class on traveling in Asia, he decided he could teach fellow travelers about visiting Europe on a budget.

``I realized I could package my mistakes into a class,'' Steves says. ``Each trip I made got so much easier. I was learning from what I did wrong. And so could other people.''

Steves distributes a free, quarterly newsletter on budget travel called ``Newscat.'' To be placed on the mailing list or for information about his guidebooks, escorted tours, lectures and travel products, contact Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door Inc., 120 Fourth Ave. North, P.O. Box 2009, Edmonds, Wash. 98020-2009, or phone (206) 771-8303. WE'RE GOING WHERE?

The top destinations for international tourism arrivals in 1996 (in millions), as reported by the World Tourism Organization:

1. France: 61.5

2. United States: 44.8

3. Spain: 44.4

4. Italy: 35.5

5. China: 26.1

6. United Kingdom: 25.8

7. Mexico: 21.7

8. Hungary: 20.7

9. Poland: 19.4

10. Canada: 17.3 HOW GOOD IS GOOD?

Wichita State University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha conducted a survey that rated the nine major U.S. airlines in 19 categories, including on-time arrival records, customer complaints, accident records and financial health. The survey ranked them overall in the following order: Southwest, American, United, Delta, Continental, Northwest, US Airways, America West and Trans World Airlines.

But compared to what?

In a Zagat survey of travelers' perceptions of 61 carriers from around the world, American ranked 28th, while United was 31, followed by Delta (32), Northwest (39), TWA (48), Continental (49) and US Airways (52).

The world-wide top 10 were: Singapore Airlines (No. 1 for the fourth consecutive year), Cathay Pacific, Swissair, Midwest Express, Japan Airlines, Thai International Airways, All Nippon Airways, Qantas, Air New Zealand and SAS.

Singapore must be doing something right.

A survey that ranks airports around the world by travelers' ratings on overall convenience lists airports in Singapore; Manchester, England; Melbourne, Australia; Amsterdam; and Zurich as the five best, according to the International Air Transport Association. The best U.S. airport was Cincinnati's, which was rated sixth over all; Orlando was seventh.

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