Couples ride up the mountain on the Hochbrixen gondola and can then take a torchlit stroll through the forest and have a candlelit supper in the igloo dining room before snuggling up in super-cosy sleeping bags on an ice bed for two swathed in fur.
The most popular and pricey resort is Whistler, which boasts a new gondola linking the Whistler and Blackcomb peaks.
Its well-groomed pistes suit beginners and intermediates, and a new eight-seater gondola has expanded the lift system.
In 1955, when a group of Rank stars went to the Venice film festival to publicise British films, Harris designed the notorious "mink" bikini that was worn by Diana Dors in a gondola.
Kittinger greeted him with a hug after the July test, but clearly thinks this is freefall for softies: "I went up in an open gondola, and Felix is going up in a very sophisticated space capsule … He's going up in luxury, he's going up in a Cadillac by comparison with what we did 51 years ago".
For morning flights to Barbados, the cognac "gondola" is stocked with bottles of Courvoisier and Hennessy; cheaper brandies take their place for afternoon flights to America and Norway.High-street formulae must be tweaked.
With more trompe l'oeil than trump cards, the Venetian comes complete with life-sized campanile, gondola rides rowed by opera singers, a Doge's Palace "only one column short of the original", a shopping mall dressed up as the Piazza San Marco under a twilight sky, and now a Guggenheim gallery.
With a flurry of publicity, the paper told its readers it would separately lower an editor and a photographer towards the molten furnace in a gondola.
Which other city can boast that its main attraction is a bustling independent book store (Powell's) and that medical students can go from one part of their campus to another by gondola, taking their bikes with them?
The centre can simulate gravitational forces in any direction in its "dynamically positioned gondola"—a fancy way of describing a cabin that can face in any direction and is attached to an arm spinning around a central point.The victims—sorry, customers are strapped in as they watch a wide screen simulating the view into space.
His twin hotels on the Strip, the Venetian and the Palazzo, combine thousands of hotel rooms, upmarket shopping (some of it lining a Venetian streetscape, complete with a painted blue sky, canals and gondola rides), restaurants, spas, banquet halls, convention centres and, of course, a casino.
