Ariana Sellas is the Travelocity Market Manager for Boston. She has been with Travelocity for more than six years. She enjoys traveling, reading, running, swimming, salsa dancing and is a zumba instructor and personal trainer. Her favorite parts of the job are the travel discounts , co-workers and hotel partners.

Turns out I’m not the only traveler who loves both dogs and Fairmont hotels. More than 8,000 votes were cast to decide the winner of Fairmont’s Cutest Canine contest on The Window Seat. Although there’s no disputing the fact that each and every one of Fairmont’s canine employees are absolutely adorable, one emerged as the clear winner, coming away with 35 percent of the vote.  And the winner is:

When the Fairmont Pittsburgh announced last week the appointment of Edie, a white Boxer/Labrador Retriever mix, to the role of Canine Ambassador, naturally I thought it was too cute for words. A lover of both dogs and the Fairmont brand, I was vaguely aware that the hotels were pet friendly and that a few – The Fairmont Copley Plaza in particular – had dogs on staff. After finding out there are in fact 12 canine employees at 10 Fairmont properties around the world,  it seemed only natural to hold a contest on The Window Seat to find out which doggie employee was in fact Fairmont’s cutest canine.

Read on for photos and a short bio of each canine employee and cast your vote for Fairmont’s Cutest Canine on the right side of this page under ‘Travel Poll.’ The winner of the Fairmont Cutest Canine Contest gets his or her very own Travelocity Roaming Gnome statue! Cast your vote by Wednesday, September 28 and look for an announcement of the winner on Thursday, September 29 on The Window Seat.

Learn more about Fairmont’s Canine Ambassadors at: http://www.fairmont.com/promotions/canineambassadors

My new book Getting Into Guinness, was released by Harper Collins on September 16th, and ever since, my life has been a frenzy of radio interviews, plus the occasional book signing and television appearance. This activity, in turn has taken me places I might never otherwise go– like Philadelphia!

Philly is a great tourist town, and I can’t say why I haven’t been in about 15 years, other than that I grew up in New York and went to school in Washington, D.C., and always just sort of took it for granted. But its attractions are many, and packed into a very user friendly pedestrian downtown. From one of the world’s greatest art museums (and for film fans, the steps Sylvester Stallone ran up while training as Rocky) to an American Icon, the Liberty Bell, downtown is full of tourist sights worth seeing.

As travelers, we do a lot of whining about how great certain places were 10 years ago—before Starbucks served Paris, before Louis Vuitton outfitted Beijing, and before cell-phone towers connected the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro to the rest of the world.

But while I was visiting Boston this weekend, I was struck not only by how much the city has changed in the past decade, but by how much better it is today. When I first went there 10 years ago, the Big Dig was in full swing: cranes dominated the skyline; displaced rats ran rampant; and construction sites isolated the city’s most historic neighborhoods from each other.

Photo courtesy of IgoUgo member zabelle